How to blog regularly

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An unlikely place for advice

Ironically, I may be the best person to give you advice on this. I've been there, and I've done it all. I have slouched and dilly-dallied, I've drafted and deleted, I've written and stashed. I can show you all the ways you can mess up a perfect flow. I know all the cracks in your plans, and the fallacies in your presumptions. Paradise is a distant dream.

Mind-body-mind: the vicious cycle

Lethargy induces mental coma; torpor leads to a writers block/creative rut. This in turn engenders lazy behaviour, and the cycle is as vicious and pernicious to the mind as it is to the body. You've gotta stay fit physically to stay in mental shape, and vice versa is equally important. Slacking off regularly and getting complacent shrouds your vision of the grand plan, and the body follows suit. This is a two way street. You gotta command over both manifestations of your soul. I can't count enough instances of taking a walk after a long break, and new energy rushing over me. It's pure magic. Being in motion really does get your brain going. Get up and move your ass.

New experiences trigger new ideas

New experiences might not necessarily give you more content to work with, but they will at least change your perspective and make you think differently. Again, there's a certain energy that...energizes you with every new experience. Knowledge and perspective are inseparable, I recently observed. You're not just data collecting every moment you live. We're not data storage units. We're perspective storage units. Every second we perceive, our mind trains itself with this new dataset, and the new memories are accompanied with updated patterns for logic, problem solving, threat identification, feelings, and questions. You can't just acquire knowledge and stash it in your brain. You get the perspective too. So, more knowledge->better perspective, since more is indubitably better to make the correct decision in the future. What I mean is, you might assume that you have the hottest take on a subject, but five years later you look back on it and...with your wisdom you see how naive and parochial your older self was. Get out, do new things, read more, consume good content, and experiences. They will shape you.

Keep Post-it notes!

What's worse than forgetting to complete a task? Forgetting about the task entirely. The key is to be cognizant of all tasks that you've left unfinished. It's great to have a visual reminder always in front of you, so you don't lose track of them in the long term. I personally struggle with being easily distracted and being myopic. So far, post-it notes have aided greatly in keeping me on track.

It's okay to not finish a blog in one go

Blogging is not a fever trip. You don't have to pour all your emotion and effort into a single run and push the product out. You're not doing this for money; so there's no need to rush. You've got to restrain the urge to finish prematurely and mark the activity as done. The only lasting takeaway you will then have on retrospection is the regret that you rushed it. It's not worth it. It is way better to be late than be crude. The other plus of taking it slow is, now you're able to draft multiple pieces and pick one up based on how you're feeling that day.

This is not just about blogging

One common theme throughout the piece has been how all of this can be applied not just to blogging, but lifestyle in general. Being able to plan, track and complete multiple large tasks is the stuff of legends. Applying that to blogging should be a great way to let discipline seep into other stuff you do.

At the end of the day, blogging should be a way to express what's on your mind, and not merely rhetoric or rhymes.