Quantity to improve quality.
I'm not big on New Year Resolutions. Not even when the year begins a new decade. However, the typical days off around the holidays do provide some time to stop and reflect. And the one thing that keeps coming to mind is that there are a lot of thoughts in my head that I would like to blog.
Unfortunately, a typical blog entry takes me a couple hours to put together. I just don’t have those hours to spend like I used to. So, in the free time made available to me this holiday I’ve been thinking about why it takes me so long to write a blog entry and what to do about it.
After much thought, the issue comes down to quality. Quality is a tricky word. The depth of it is explored in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
But the desire to make each sentence “high quality” slows the whole writing process to a crawl and very little content comes of it. That leads to a frustrating back log of items to write. In turn, the frustration leads to a lack of desire to write. You can see how this gets us nowhere fast.
So, after much thought, I’ve decided to try a new tactic. I’m going to just write and post. That means that some ideas will end up here half baked. Other ideas might be missing the necessary back story for them to make much sense. Some yet might contain some serious grammar or sentence structure problems (comma splices are sure to be an issue).
However, my hope is that by relaxing a lot and simply getting the concepts written down, I will slowly improve my velocity at creating quality. Or maybe I’ll find that quality isn’t all that important. Either way, I hope to find more enjoyment in blogging.
I have not decided what velocity I should target. I’m thinking two blog posts in addition to the WiX Working Group video post on Thursday might round out the weeks well. I expect there will be quite a few more personal things posted but I hope to post more entries about setup and particularly the WiX Toolset. Of course, responses to your questions or comments could easily turn into entries here as well. <smile/>
So here’s to my pseudo-New Year Resolution for 2010. Happy New Year and I hope to see you around here a bit more.