Last night I decided to get more serious about blogging after watching one of my favorite YouTubers, Ali Abdaal. I just discovered him a couple months ago, so I haven’t nearly watched all of his content–and what I have seen I don’t necessarily agree with 100%–but I appreciate his ideas and his delivery of them nonetheless. 

One of his recent videos encourages blog writing. Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve been encouraged to blog. I finished a Master of Education degree in Digital Learning not long ago (October 2022), and during that program, one of the professors was also a big proponent of blogging. Even as I blogged every week, I wasn’t incredibly keen on it–mainly because of time constraints–but I was at least somewhat on board. Not to mention that outside of blogging for course credit, I’ve had a ‘start and stop’ pattern with blogging that has been ongoing since at least 2007. Perhaps this is the time that I’ll finally keep it going.

I find that one of the best ways to establish a habit is to make your frequency, volume, or whatever the case, something sustainable. This is true regarding exercise, reading, project completion, and just about everything. If you tell yourself you have to do a large amount of X every day, you’ll often give up because it was too tall an order for what fits into your life and your daily bandwidth. Keeping your goal reasonable and truly doable daily, weekly, and monthly is better.

In the past, when I thought about writing in a blog, I overshot on length, telling myself I needed to write 1,000 words for each entry. It hasn’t helped that in recent years I’ve read that optimal blog length is something like 1,700 to 2,400 words. (Those lengths are considered ideal because they get shared and re-tweeted the most.)

The reality is that I want to enjoy writing in a blog, not feel like it is homework or a chore. I have enough to do with a full-time job as an instructional designer. I’m a person who likes writing, but even with that being the case, I dread having daily or weekly “homework” of 1,000 to 2,400-word blog entries. When I think of 500 words, on the other hand, I become happy. 

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized we spend too much time trying to please others or live up to real or imagined standards. Sometimes we’re not wrong about expectations, but even if we aren’t, it doesn’t mean we have to spend our lives living up to them. It’s more important to do what brings us joy. Of course, I am not saying to live only for personal pleasure. We all have to do certain things in life that aren’t what we consider “pleasure,” and in certain contexts, we must meet expectations. I am saying that in contexts where there is no objective pressure on us to do anything, but we want to do that thing, we should find a way to do it that adds to our joy rather than puts stress on us.

I hope I’ll keep blogging by not putting too much pressure on quality, length, or frequency. I’ve been so much happier when I do things on my own terms.