I will not blog in the morning

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...time for a new post (see comments from the last post if you don’t get the reference).

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I will not blog in the morning.

This is my new mantra.

What it has taken me far too long to discover is that when I check my e-mails and do a minor round of blog surfing before I settle down to get some work done, I don’t get round to settling down to get some work done.

By the time I’ve replied to comments on my blog, looked at the latest Blunt Cogs entry and maybe left a comment or two, done a quick round of the blogs I can remember leaving comments on the previous evening to see if anyone’s posted a follow up reply, then about an hour to an hour and a half seems to have passed and my head is completely in blog mode, which is incompatible with any other creative endeavour.

Close to 20 years ago, my Dad got Satellite TV installed. Back in those days there were a mere 30 to 40 channels to chose from, but compared to the 4 on standard terrestrial TV it seemed infinite. What I eventually discovered, after many months of doing bugger all with my life, was that on days when I got up, had my breakfast, and decided to do a bit of channel hopping while I drank my coffee, was that 2 hours later, as I finally decided to tear myself away from the shopping channel or topless darts, I was good for nothing for the rest of the day. I wasn’t creative, I had no energy and I really couldn’t face doing anything more challenging than, well, sitting in front of the TV all day, channel hopping.

Now although in our house we don’t have Satellite nor digital TV, my wife reported something similar with daytime television when I used to go to work and she was in charge of the house and kids. She said she’d plan on just watching 20 minutes of “Trisha” or “Richard & Judy” while she had a cup of coffee, before getting up to sort out the day, but before she new it, it was lunchtime and she couldn’t face the idea of doing anything else.

Now ok, blogging is a more active thing than watching TV, but the main thing is that it occupies the mind; it fills it up until you can’t really think of anything else. So the chances of getting anything else done, like write this bloody book for example, disappears completely.

So now I’m putting a self-imposed restriction on myself that I must not look at blogs or e-mails before lunch. If I get a good morning’s work done, then I can allow myself a peek at my e-mails afterwards. I’m going to see if this new regime works for a few weeks, or whether I have to tweak it some more, perhaps not letting myself near the thing before evening.

And in the meantime I will try not to feel the pressure to try and keep up with the fact that I’ve now had 2 successive posts that have had over 30 comments (and there’s a subject for another post – blogging pressure…)