A Senior Developer working mostly with PHP and JavaScript, with a bit of Python thrown in for good measure, all on Linux. My tooling is simple, it's GitLab and JetBrains where possible.
I've mentioned on Twitter that time is my great holdback.
So far this year I've kept to my posting twice a week, but that kind of cadence is so incredibly time consuming. It uses up all my free time. If I was to go back 10 years, I'd have had the time to undertake that cadence, and be comfortable with it. But I didn't have a family life back then.
To put figures on it, I generally get 2-3 hours on 3 evenings a week to myself. That is the sum total of my free time before I need sleep. The rest of my time is work, family, or sleep. Less than 10 hours per week to create two articles, review drafts, find or create headline images, create the posts to Twitter, create the cross-posting to Dev to help build the audience. Some days I just don't feel like writing, so that's 2-3 hours lost.
For the first time since November I have no content scheduled for my blog. I have enough in drafts to polish off and cover half of my schedule for the next 3 weeks.
I've got the ideas for what to write, which could sustain my planned output until June with no further ideas. It's just some of those need time to properly research and structure.
Despite my best efforts, I'm going to have to change my plans for content so I can actually do more than just write. I want to be able to learn things and do things, then post about those where I feel there's a benefit to others. If I don't my career will stall because I'm not building my skills, and my content will dry up naturally anyway as I run out of things to write without doing the research.
Plans are great, and I would love to have the time to create more content, learn new things, create or contribute to other projects, and still have down-time. But the reality is that there's only a small number of hours in a day, and I am only human.
I can definitely commiserate with what you're saying here, especially this bit—you're definitely not alone:
If I was to go back 10 years, I'd have had the time to undertake that cadence, and be comfortable with it. But I didn't have a family life back then.
With regards to needing more time in-between the writing, I liken this to negative space in art, or perhaps to silence in music. It's possible for a melody to go on and on without pause, but it wouldn't be the most enjoyable to listen to. Great composers treat silence as a first-class citizen (to borrow some tech lingo). The melody needs to both breathe in and out to keep the listener engaged. Likewise a writer needs some breathing room, otherwise there's just no way to keep producing engaging content.
I don't know if that analogy makes sense, but your plan, to me, does.
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I've mentioned on Twitter that time is my great holdback.
So far this year I've kept to my posting twice a week, but that kind of cadence is so incredibly time consuming. It uses up all my free time. If I was to go back 10 years, I'd have had the time to undertake that cadence, and be comfortable with it. But I didn't have a family life back then.
To put figures on it, I generally get 2-3 hours on 3 evenings a week to myself. That is the sum total of my free time before I need sleep. The rest of my time is work, family, or sleep. Less than 10 hours per week to create two articles, review drafts, find or create headline images, create the posts to Twitter, create the cross-posting to Dev to help build the audience. Some days I just don't feel like writing, so that's 2-3 hours lost.
For the first time since November I have no content scheduled for my blog. I have enough in drafts to polish off and cover half of my schedule for the next 3 weeks.
I've got the ideas for what to write, which could sustain my planned output until June with no further ideas. It's just some of those need time to properly research and structure.
Despite my best efforts, I'm going to have to change my plans for content so I can actually do more than just write. I want to be able to learn things and do things, then post about those where I feel there's a benefit to others. If I don't my career will stall because I'm not building my skills, and my content will dry up naturally anyway as I run out of things to write without doing the research.
Plans are great, and I would love to have the time to create more content, learn new things, create or contribute to other projects, and still have down-time. But the reality is that there's only a small number of hours in a day, and I am only human.
I can definitely commiserate with what you're saying here, especially this bit—you're definitely not alone:
With regards to needing more time in-between the writing, I liken this to negative space in art, or perhaps to silence in music. It's possible for a melody to go on and on without pause, but it wouldn't be the most enjoyable to listen to. Great composers treat silence as a first-class citizen (to borrow some tech lingo). The melody needs to both breathe in and out to keep the listener engaged. Likewise a writer needs some breathing room, otherwise there's just no way to keep producing engaging content.
I don't know if that analogy makes sense, but your plan, to me, does.