Conclusion

Last sunday, I decided to abort my daily blog. Yesterday, my habit tracker stopped tracking the RSS feed. This is the last post I'll write for it. But why am I stopping now, only ten days before I would have been finished anyway?

I pictured the conclusion I wanted to write even before I started this experiment. I hoped that it would make me a publishing machine, that my creative work, my self-doubt, and all my problems were easier to handle after I would be finished. Soon, the conclusion turned to: This project was fun, but 100 days were much too long. Right now, I think acted rashly when I started it, and am just glad to be done.

I wrote some posts I'm proud of (most notably No. 03, No. 37, and No. 49). I'm not proud of them because they turned out great. I don't think I'm in the position to assess that. I'm proud of them because they all were based on ideas I had had for some time (in one case about 18 months), and never found the courage to work on. I wanted to make them perfect. My daily blog helped me to let go of my perfectionism, and to give them a go. The result is unpolished, but it's so much better than not having them written at all.

During this project, I wrote more then ever before. This isn't just positive. For some posts I enjoyed the additional time I spend on them. But overall, I think it had a negative impact on the rest of my life. I didn't pay attention to anything else, stopped working out or caring for me otherwise. I became much more lethargic.

One post in particular is noteworthy because of how bad it is. Besides my blog, I have a set of private notes I use as a tool for learning. Since I started posting daily, I stopped writing in them. In Goodhart's Law, I tried to expand a private note I had and write something for my blog at the same time. It failed miserably. While working on this post, I realised that writing about what I learned and learning something are two separate (if closely related) processes. I also realised that I don't have the attention to post daily and still work on learning something new.

When I started with this project, I was stuck with my blog. One problem I had was that I spent too much time on irrelevant details. To counter this perfectionism, I started this project on a whim. And it helped. But other problems stayed. I still don't know how to find an audience. I still don't know what I want to do with my time. But instead of helping me to solve these problems, blogging daily made it impossible for me to even think about them. While I'm writing this conclusion, I'm too tired to think objectively about this project. I'm just glad to be able to do different things again.