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Version: 7.3-2 (32-bit)
Python 2.7.3 |EPD 7.3-2 (32-bit)| (default, Apr 12 2012, 11:28:34)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
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>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.date(2013,05,26) - datetime.date(2011,12,3)
datetime.timedelta(540)
>>>
That’s my way of saying I’ve posted for 540 days straight. Also on the order of 599 out of 600. Yeah me!
In fall of 2011, just on a lark and as an experiment in behavior modification, I set a goal of posting for 365 days straight. I slipped up, got back on the horse and never looked back. Mission accomplished.
Got a few other things to say, so more after the break:
It’s fairly amazing some of the things I’ve managed to push past:
- Holidays and holiday travel
- “Vacations”
- Crunch times at work
- Work travel
- Long days of work + kid + social
- Personal illness
- Oral surgery
- When my wife was in the emergency room after a car accident
- When I was in the emergency room after passing out from dehydration
- Days when I thought I had nothing to say
- Days when I really didn’t want to say anything
- Days when the world had more important things going on
I learned a lot on this road. Every day I tried to push out some content at least of interest to me, and maybe to someone else. If you’re not in it for the money or the fame, that’s the best you can do. Getting worked up about some fictitious “audience” doesn’t do you any good.
A wide, but not overwhelming, variety of source feeds is necessary. Particular tools don’t make much difference, although posting from the iPhone came in handy a few times. I occasionally did the prepared in advance post thing, but 90% of them were fresh baked that day. Queueing ’em up always seemed a bit like cheating.
One final, interesting observation about a time oriented goal like this one, is that you can’t make it go any slower or faster. No way to speed it up and get it over with quicker. No way to put it on pause just because you’ve got an issue in your life. It’s all about grinding out the clock. But in a twist, you start to crave the daily achievement. You wake up thinking about what today’s post should be. And you get a bit fidgety late in the evening if you haven’t yet met deadline. It becomes an addiction, but in this case a good one.