Last year, despite not really knowing why (i.e. who I was writing for other than for myself) I decided to make a concerted effort to get into the habit of writing posts for this website on a reasonably frequent basis. By reasonably frequent I was hoping to add three or four entries each week or, to borrow a phrase from the writer Oliver Burkeman, dailyish.
After a fairly slow start (four new entries in January 2025), I picked up momentum and went on to add eight in February, twelve in March, thirteen in April, seven in May, eleven in June, eight in July, and another eight August. Okay, I wasn’t hitting an average of three or four entries per week, but with five separate weeks during which I wrote no entries at all (in January, February, March, April and July) and a five week hiatus with zero entries between mid-May and mid-June, I had managed to write 71 entries in the 23 weeks in which I did produce some new words, giving me an average of just over three entries per week in those ‘productive’ weeks.
During this time period, my blog posts were split between six categories – 24 relating to my Art, 24 about books that I had read, 18 that featured my poems (transferring these across from my poetry website andapoet.blog), five about my writing, three that I described as ‘Wisdom’ and a couple that were ‘Miscellaneous’.
I was generally pleased with how I was doing, and the progress I was making. I had generated a list of topics for future posts – about the art I created, the books I had read, poems I had to add to the site, snippets about my writing, walks that I could describe etc. – which gave me no shortage of future material. Having this list ought to have been positive, indeed it was positive during the first eight months of the year. My progress continued into September, as I added another five entries in the first twelve days of the month. But then I stopped writing completely, my last entry being on 12th September 2025, some 279 days ago… a long time… over three-quarters of a year…
What changed? Did I just get bored? Did I get distracted? Did I decide that since pretty much no-one reads what I write here there simply wasn’t any point in my continuing? It’s possible that the latter was a contributing factor. It’s certainly one that has led me to question my blog writing activity before (for example see Habits, Daily Blogging… Is This The End? ), but no, those answers are not the answer…
My blog writing activity died off because I innocently did the one thing that is pretty much guaranteed to stop me doing any activity I am engaged in, or want to be engaged in. I turned a thing into a THING. This is something that I have written about on this website before, back in 2018 in fact – see: Turning Things Into THINGS. It is one of the primary ways that I sabotage my own desire to tackle an activity. Turning a thing into a THING involves taking what could be a simple, interesting, enjoyable activity, and ambitiously growing it in my mind by adding extra elements (‘bells-and-whistles’) so that it becomes a huge, enormously complicated, and/or daunting challenge that my brain then looks at and says “no thank you very much – that looks like a project that is far too difficult, and potentially painful, for me to take on”.
In the case of this blog, turning a thing into a THING took the following form. In early September 2025 I sat down, looked at my carefully curated and categorised list of potential blog post topics and decided that it would be really great to accelerate my writing so that I was fully ‘caught up’ by the end of November 2025. This was a 10 week period and I had 61 possible blog post topics on my list (many about books that I had read during the previous few months). 61 posts in 10 weeks? ~6 posts per week? That’s only one per day, with a day spare each week… sounds perfectly doable doesn’t it?
Well no, it doesn’t, or at least it shouldn’t have, but what did my brain have to say about the idea? I can tell you. In a journal entry that I wrote on Saturday 13th September I wrote the words ‘… it’s a good plan and I can try to get into a good discipline of writing daily posts on weekdays and adding one or two at the weekends if I can or if I have missed weekday posts‘. It all sounds so simple… [I’ll also note here that my had a multi-week sequence that rotated through the different categories of the possible posts in such a way that they were all nicely spread out through the entire period. If that sounds a bit over-the-top then temember, my plan wasn’t a ‘thing’, it was a ‘THING’.]
If I had set my stall out to simply to carry on writing the odd blog post when I had the chance – perhaps two or three in a good week – then it would have been an activity, a thing, that would have stood a decent chance of getting done. Instead, I turned the thing into a THING and, in the process, killed the activity entirely. To make matters worse, not only have I added nothing to this site for the best part of nine months, but during those months I have frequently berated myself for, and felt disappointed with, my lack of action. I killed off an activity I enjoyed, and I gave myself a new stick to beat myself with. Bravo!
On countless occasions over the last few months I have thought about how I might get back to writing for this blog. Mostly, my thoughts have revolved around trying to come up with new ways that I can somehow, magically, catch up with my post backlog. You see, the perfectionist/completist/collector in me hates the idea that I might not write an entry for every book that I have read, every piece of artwork I produce etc. It quickly rules out the simplest approach, which is to just start adding entries again relating to what I am up to at the moment. An incomplete sequence? A gap? No, no, NO… you cannot possibly have a gap.
But I have fought with myself for long enough, and I recognise that the choice is a simple one. I can think that I can somehow catch up and be destined to remain stuck forever (or at least far behind where I’d like to be), or I can just write something and be done with it. And somehow, unusually for me, the second of these options seems, finally, to have come out on top.
So, here I am again, back on the blog. I’d like to think that I will be able to write new posts on a reasonably frequent basis – two or three a week would be great, one or two would be okay – and I’m going to try to allow myself to write a mix of posts, some relating to ‘now things’ and others picking selected topics from the list that I created previously without requiring myself to cover them all, or to ‘catch up’ within any specific time frame or better still, ever.
Will I be successful? Well I’m not even going to try to second guess the answer to that question. To do so will surely only lead to me into making another marvellous plan in an attempt to ensure success, a marvellous plan that will actually, almost certainly, guarantee failure!
Tim O'Hare 