How to make daily blogging worth its time

The week is almost over. It was a week in which I didn't get much done. While thinking about why this is the case, I stumbled over a question that came up a few times already. Is the post I'm writing each day worth its time?

Each morning I sit down and write a post. More often than not, I don't know what to write about. In the end, I always come up with something I'm willing to publish. Even if working on these posts is fun in the moment, it always feels like it doesn't go anywhere. I'm just going through the motions of writing.

The posts I remember the most fondly are the ones, where I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. Sometimes I was working on an idea I had for a long time, or was writing about moments where I had changed my mind recently. For some posts it was just trying something new. They are not necessarily my best writing. One of the posts I'm keeping in good memory is Goodhart's Law. I also don't like how it turned out. I tried something new and it didn't work. But I went into my writing with an intention.

I'm glad about every post I wrote, even those I did write without an intention. Going through the motions is better than sitting on the couch and eating crisps. But it isn't real training. It doesn't create progress. When I ignore the time I spend eating, working, sleeping, and all the other things in my everyday life, I have about six hours per day left to fill however I please. Each post takes around two hours. This correspond to approximately two thirds of my free time. For this amount, my time is too valuable to just go through the motions.

Is daily writing worth it? If I'm doing it right, the answer is a definite yes. The last forty days changed my attitude to creative work completely. I did some things I didn't know were possible. There is a benefit to forcing you to come up with something new each day, even if you don't know what it is when you start working. It's a great exercise if you aren't used to it. But by now, I'm hitting diminishing returns. One approach to change this is to take thirty minutes each evening to think about the topic of next day's post. I already gave this advice to myself a few weeks ago. Back then, writing without an idea was still a valuable exercise. And so I ignored it. For the last two weeks, this is no longer the case. It's time to come back to it.