Consistency is key! This is kind of obvious but I want to convince you it matters more than you'd think, if you have a blog or newsletter. Plus I have practical tips (that aren't entirely a Beeminder infomercial).
The least obvious point is how much your readers like it when you publish on a predictable schedule. Substack goes on and on about this and recommends posting weekly. Part of it is demonstrating your general reliability, but most is reader psychology. There's the anticipation of new posts, the routine and habituation of reading them —readers mentally budgeting for it. When a new post appears unexpectedly, even if it's a pleasant surprise, people are more likely to put off reading it, which means they're less likely to end up reading it.
Of course what really makes readers drop like flies is when you take a hiatus that's long enough that they forget they ever subscribed and think your new post (or the notification for it) is spam. There are even email deliverability concerns. Mailchimp says that going more than a month without sending something is bad and if it's been six months you should really have everyone reconfirm they even want to be subscribed.
Slippery Slopes
But you're not going to go a month without posting, you say? You just need one more day to do some more editing? And one more day doesn't matter so much? Yes yes yes. The danger is saying "one more day won't matter" day after day until your blog is covered in cobwebs.
So even if you don't care about your readers, consistency matters for you.
Maybe commit to writing 500 words per day? That's what everyone at Inkhaven has committed to for the month of November, on pain of getting kicked out. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Beeminder is what the cool rationalists use to do that (when not at Inkhaven). "Safety ropes for slippery slopes", we call it. See especially the old Beeminder post about ways to automatically send your wordcount to Beeminder.
Or maybe you'd prefer to commit to spending a certain amount of time, say 15 minutes a day, on writing. At Beeminder we do generally recommend committing to actions rather than outcomes. I'd say either time spent or words written count as actions, but technically if you absolutely can't think of the next word you want to write, time spent is the only thing fully under your control. But this assumes you're disciplined enough to stay totally focused on writing during that time. (You could use the stochastic self-sampling time-tracker, TagTime, to ensure you only count time spent actually writing or actively thinking about your prose, but that comes with a whole host of other problems.)
At the other extreme of the action-outcome spectrum would be something like committing to grow your number of subscribers by some amount. Don't try to beemind that unless you're a masochist. If you care about subscriber count, commit to corresponding actions like advertising or cross-promotion or whatever.
For beeminding time spent writing, the nerdier among you might like the WakaTime Beeminder integration. WakaTime has plugins for pretty much every coding editor. But maybe even non-nerds should try writing prose in a coding editor. The AI features are getting frighteningly powerful. If you don't like that idea, Beeminder has integrations with other time-tracking tools.
And it's not like Beeminder is the only game in town for committing to things. There are plenty of Beeminder competitors. Or just use social accountability. Promise friends and family you'll stick to a publishing schedule. You could even, I don't know, start a newsletter called AGI Friday so you're compelled to send something out every Friday.
Consistency is key! This is kind of obvious but I want to convince you it matters more than you'd think, if you have a blog or newsletter. Plus I have practical tips (that aren't entirely a Beeminder infomercial).
The least obvious point is how much your readers like it when you publish on a predictable schedule. Substack goes on and on about this and recommends posting weekly. Part of it is demonstrating your general reliability, but most is reader psychology. There's the anticipation of new posts, the routine and habituation of reading them —readers mentally budgeting for it. When a new post appears unexpectedly, even if it's a pleasant surprise, people are more likely to put off reading it, which means they're less likely to end up reading it.
Of course what really makes readers drop like flies is when you take a hiatus that's long enough that they forget they ever subscribed and think your new post (or the notification for it) is spam. There are even email deliverability concerns. Mailchimp says that going more than a month without sending something is bad and if it's been six months you should really have everyone reconfirm they even want to be subscribed.
Slippery Slopes
But you're not going to go a month without posting, you say? You just need one more day to do some more editing? And one more day doesn't matter so much? Yes yes yes. The danger is saying "one more day won't matter" day after day until your blog is covered in cobwebs.
So even if you don't care about your readers, consistency matters for you.
Maybe commit to writing 500 words per day? That's what everyone at Inkhaven has committed to for the month of November, on pain of getting kicked out. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Beeminder is what the cool rationalists use to do that (when not at Inkhaven). "Safety ropes for slippery slopes", we call it. See especially the old Beeminder post about ways to automatically send your wordcount to Beeminder.
Or maybe you'd prefer to commit to spending a certain amount of time, say 15 minutes a day, on writing. At Beeminder we do generally recommend committing to actions rather than outcomes. I'd say either time spent or words written count as actions, but technically if you absolutely can't think of the next word you want to write, time spent is the only thing fully under your control. But this assumes you're disciplined enough to stay totally focused on writing during that time. (You could use the stochastic self-sampling time-tracker, TagTime, to ensure you only count time spent actually writing or actively thinking about your prose, but that comes with a whole host of other problems.)
At the other extreme of the action-outcome spectrum would be something like committing to grow your number of subscribers by some amount. Don't try to beemind that unless you're a masochist. If you care about subscriber count, commit to corresponding actions like advertising or cross-promotion or whatever.
For beeminding time spent writing, the nerdier among you might like the WakaTime Beeminder integration. WakaTime has plugins for pretty much every coding editor. But maybe even non-nerds should try writing prose in a coding editor. The AI features are getting frighteningly powerful. If you don't like that idea, Beeminder has integrations with other time-tracking tools.
And it's not like Beeminder is the only game in town for committing to things. There are plenty of Beeminder competitors. Or just use social accountability. Promise friends and family you'll stick to a publishing schedule. You could even, I don't know, start a newsletter called AGI Friday so you're compelled to send something out every Friday.