Door #3 - 01

The last few months are a lesson to me about content creation: you can always produce more, but it may not always be better. Even the most creative person in the world has a tipping point for their creative juices. Mine have been running in the red for too long now. I’m being asked to produce more content now than I ever have been. This is a dream come true, but it also comes with its side effects.

Nowadays my time is filled with a different type of content creation. I get to teach our students at Mid Rivers every week, which means that I write the entire manuscript (2200-2500 words) and practice it several times before Tuesday night. Add in a variety of devotionals, letters, responses to students’ questions, and journal entries, and the ol’ keyboard is getting quite the workout.

It’s a good thing for me as a writer and teacher, but the effect has been felt in my blogging. I used to blog five days a week, sometimes every day. That’s ebbed and petered down to a slight dribble of blogging. I used to write a series of posts called the Friday List. They were collections of random facts and interesting ideas that I’d come across each week and barf out into cyberspace. That came off life support at the 1st of the year.

I’ll admit, I’ve felt a huge tension as I try to maintain my blogging frequency and the content demands. My time demands and the quality of content that I want to share just aren’t a reality right now. They’re just not playing nice together. So, the natural inclination might be one of two things: try ratcheting my blogging frequency back up to five times a week, or pull the plug on the whole deal.

I choose Door #3.

I’m choosing to blog less, but still schedule out my content postings for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It’s not as frequently as I’d like, but it puts up a good boundary for me to post as I can. It gives me a chance to breathe between posting. When I was posting five times a week, I noticed a dip in quality at times. The pressure to post for the sake of posting can be hard to resist if you’ve put that standard in your mind.

And now I don’t feel that pressure any more. Sometimes your creativity needs a Sabbath. Sometimes you need to take a former dream outside and give it a decent burial. Sometimes it means you need to let go of what you’re holding tight with one hand so you can grab something else even better. Sometimes it means that the first two options aren’t what you feel is best.

Sometimes we all need a Door #3.