Matthew Lang

The observant among you will have noticed another lull in my writing here. It's been a frustrating few months trying to get back to a steady rhythm of blogging. I truly miss the days from a couple of years ago when I was writing and publishing on a daily basis. Those were good times.

There are a number of reasons why this has happened and I won't bore you with the obvious ones like "I'm too busy" and "I'm too tired". Instead I thought I would take a look at the not so obvious reasons.

I don't have the thousands of avid readers that others have but there is a steadily increasing number of readers here. Page views and visitors have been going up over the last two three years. A good sign that I'm doing something right. And yet ever since I noticed the amount of traffic my blog has been receiving, I've noticed that the frequency with which I write to the blog has been decreasing.

Stage fright?

You might call it that. I've lost track of the amount of posts that I have started writing and then abandoned. It's frustrating to start writing something and then trash it and go over the process again and again. I find that half the battle is not in writing something but writing something fit to publish.

The second reason is the choice of topics. For a long time I was writing daily about apps, web development, freelancing, productivity and a few other things. Trying to find something to write about in these areas has been a struggle lately. I'm starting to wonder if I am restricting myself in the topics that I could be writing about. Do I need to start looking further afield? Maybe. Or maybe I need to look back on what I wrote in the past and refresh it? Lots of things change and the topics that I wrote about three years ago could have changed.

Who knows.

All I know is that the mere act of reflecting on the lack of writing has prompted me to write something for the blog. And that is a start in the right direction once more.

Daniel's decision to delete the majority of his social media accounts is a reminder that social media isn't a necessity in life. You can live without it you know!

Last year, returning from one of my Blurb missions, I landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County California. We were fortunate and actually landed eight minutes early. The only issue was we didn’t have a gate. The pilot came on and said “The good news is that we are early, but we are going to have to wait eight minutes for a place to park.” The woman next to me, based on her clothing and briefcase, was who I would label as a midlevel executive, business traveler. During our delay she turned on her phone, punched in the code and checked her Facebook page twenty-four times in eight minutes. Again, I don’t use “addiction” lightly.

— Why I Deleted My Social Media Accounts by Daniel Milnor

A nice reminder from NB for the weekend.