Now that this blog is in its fourth year (yay!) I’ve been posting entries on a fairly regular schedule. Usually I write three (optimistically four) posts a week: a Clutter Comedy post every Sunday, a Nurturing Thursday post every Thursday, and one or two articles or stories in between. That’s mostly good because my blog now has more content than it had in past years, and the posts that I write for my two regular feature days flow pretty easily because they’re short and structured.

But if Wednesday evening arrives and I haven’t yet written the miscellaneous early-week post, then I feel as if I’m slacking off because my readers will expect me to stay on my regular schedule. Yes, I know that’s a silly thing to worry about. I never had any plans to make money from my blog, so there’s certainly no reason to think of it as having a production schedule like work; and in reality, I don’t believe I have such a demanding audience.

If I slack off once, though, I might do it again, and then this blog could end up as just another derelict hulk adrift in cyberspace. It’s the slippery slope worry—once you start slipping, there’s just no telling where you might end up!
 

Waterfall over steep, slippery rocks.

(Creative Commons image via flickr)
 

Earlier today, when I didn’t have anything in mind to write, I got those slacking-off feelings and then started giving myself a lecture on how ridiculous it was to worry about staying on a schedule that I had just invented last year for no particular reason. Life in the modern world already has too many randomly imposed expectations, so why add more?

I had just about decided it was time to apply to the Court of Conscience for official permission to slack off, when I realized that everything I had been telling myself would work just fine as a blog entry! So as it turned out, there’s a post for Wednesday after all, and no need to get myself an excuse note just yet.

4 Comments

  1. love it!! Yes, you have permission 🙂

  2. Haha…we are sooo alike! In more ways than one! I play this same worry game in my mind. Also, I recently felt like I needed to go to yoga class but decided I couldn’t make it. Rather than feel terrible about missing yoga, turned it into a blog post. Maybe there is a personality type that becomes a blogger, and our worrying works for us? I’d like to think so 🙂

    • I suspect that it’s not just bloggers and that a lot of people have these worries about whatever it is they want to do or create. We live in such a high-pressure society with so many choices, it’s hard to get away from those feelings that we’re missing out on things and not doing enough…

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