Blogging is hard. It requires a decision on so many things: what is the topic of your blog; what about the niche; where are you going to host your blog, is it Facebook or Medium, or do you maybe want to self-host your very own WordPress instance? After having figured out all of that, it’s just writing, right?
Yes, sort of. It’s just writing about what you have researched, learnt or experienced. It’s just sitting yourself down to think and do the work. Decide what you want to say, how you want your message to be structured and how you want it to sound. Also, you might want to ask yourself how this particular post matches your strategy and content plan, which you totally should have.
There are many more things to sort out, like choosing your blog appearance or coming up with a custom design; developing a monetisation strategy if you plan to make money from your blog; let’s not forget promoting your blog; doing SEO; collecting metrics to do analytics; the list goes on. So what is the hardest part among all of these things in my opinion?
Have a look at my blog. How many posts does it have so far? Just one (excluding this one), and it’s been about eight months already since its inception, sad. It turns out that, the hardest part for me is to sit and do the actual work. Despite all my doubts about the perspectives of my endeavour, regardless of all the “I’m not a writer”, “not a blogger”, etc. thoughts in my head, to sit down, put on mental blinders to ignore everything but my new post in front of me, and write is the hardest thing among them all.
I asked myself, “How come such a simple thing is so challenging?” and I realised that there was a lot of mental resistance to this sit-down-and-do-the-work thing. Instead of directing my attention to only the post itself, I constantly made the mistake of letting all the troubles described above be in my head. And it felt too much. On the other side, day-to-day duties and other some-day-todos knocked at my brain, and whatever appeared less painful than blogging always got priority.
The good news is that I don’t have to travel far for the solution. Where the problem is in the head, the solution is also there. This post happened thanks to the magic of three things: social commitment, allocating time to blogging in advance, and taming my perfectionism. My friend helped me a lot, he proposed an agreement where I had to write one “imperfect” post each week. And that killed two birds with one stone for me, I don’t want to break the agreement (a good example of external motivation or “motivation from”); and an “imperfect post” is less scary to work on, so the resistance is not that strong any more. The last bit which is very important is to dedicate time when only two activities are allowed: writing a blog or doing nothing. I mean it, NOTHING. I either write or just stand or sit, no music, movies, food, phone, chatting with anyone — nothing! And that makes writing pretty a pretty attractive option.
At the end of the day, blogging is just like any other habit that takes time, conscious effort and changing your environment to help to incorporate it. Going to the gym to get in shape, learning a new language, learning to draw or following a healthy diet. It’s all the same, after all. The key is to reduce resistance and find a way to trick yourself into doing little steps regularly.
We can do it! One step at a time.
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