Blogging Cadence

Posted On: 2019-06-03

By Mark

While Feedback Fridays have been exceptionally helpful for gathering feedback and understanding my project, I am finding that it doesn't fit very well with writing a blog post for Monday. There are two things in particular that I find are making it conflict with my blogging schedule:

1. Playtesting and feedback generally provides a very high density of relevant information. While this is ordinarily extremely good, it means that it has a high likelihood of changing, or at least influencing, the direction that the project will go in the short-term. In the context of blogging, this diminishes my ability to plan my blog post in advance, as I have a reasonably good chance of having a significant change in plans over the weekend.
2. The particular way that I interact with Feedback Friday involves a large amount of thought and detailed writing. Reflecting on it, I am realizing that this is the same skill set that I draw on whenever I write a blog post. This is important, as I find that I am best able to draw on this skill set when I have the opportunity to recharge it. As such, any blog post I write after a weekend of providing feedback will likely be shorter and lower quality than one that I would write if I were fully rested and recovered.

Together, these two issues create a significant obstacle: a post I write ahead of time is likely to be irrelevant or inaccurate and a post I write after a weekend of feedback is likely to be of diminished quality. The obvious solution for this is to change the schedule of the blog, but I find that starting a week with a blog post has helped in the past, as it often serves as something of a planning session for the week: I often think through what objectives I have for that week, even if I ultimately decide that those objectives are not interesting enough to be a blog post.

I will be avoiding this issue next week, since I don't intend to participate in gathering feedback over the weekend (I am planning to focus on longer term objectives this week, so I won't have anything new to show.) While convenient, this doesn't help me advance towards finding an actual solution to this issue. Instead, I intend to try a very different approach: I will write a "timeless" blog post that I will keep in reserve for the next time I need to gather feedback. (In case it's not clear, what I am calling a "timeless" blog post is a post about something that I have prior knowledge about and not actively working on, so it should remain relevant and interesting independent of what's going on in my day-to-day.) Hopefully having a post like that available will allow me to both gather feedback over a weekend and still remain interesting on Monday.

So, in summary, Feedback Fridays are useful, but I need a different approach to blogging in order to sustainably use them. I have one idea that I intend to try out, but we won't get to see the results for at least a week (possibly more.) Hopefully this post has been interesting to read. As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback, please let me know.