Inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, I started posting something every day here last year on October 4th. The 1 year mark passed by and I didn’t even notice. It’s become such a part of my mental routine to keep up with that it’s become pretty painless.

Most of my posts are topics I find interesting or links I run across. I find myself zeroing in on themes that tend to appear in my reading patterns. Through the process I’ve also come up with a few recurring “series” type posts to do regularly:

• Weekend Reading — a link list of 3 recent interesting things, posted on Saturdays
• Places — a series where I highlight interesting geographies
• Best Songs — infrequently logging my personal favorites
• Book Reviews — also infrequent, but enjoyable to write when I find the time
• Goal Progress — on the 1st of each month, a review of progress against personal goals for the prior month

One healthy side effect of the blogging habit has been a reduction in social media usage. I still flip through Twitter occasionally, but the majority of my reading has converted to books, RSS feeds, and a handful of newsletters. Through this commitment to writing every day, I’ve had to pare down the amount of time I burn on “wasteful” activities — TV/movies, gaming, etc. Knowing that I have a commitment to keep up with a regular blogging pattern forces me to stay on task with relevant writing and reading.

One thing I would like to explore soon is how I might be able to schedule posts to go out. Since I write and publish this site with Jekyll and Netlify, it’s all managed in a git repository, without a good way to schedule future posts. So I’ve forgotten to push my changes a number of times, discovering a day late that I never published something. I’m toying with the idea of moving to something like Ghost for a more full-featured writing environment. I’ll mess around with that over the next couple of months and see if there’s something there.

Even though I hit the 1-year streak, I have no plans to stop the every day publishing. Let’s keep this train moving.