In praise of inconsistency: Ditching weekly posts

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Earlier this year, I decided to start posting more consistently to my website and mailing list. I’ve pretty much stuck to a weekly posting schedule, partly because I enjoy writing and partly as a way of exploring and sharing ideas. However, the problem with feeling like I have to post weekly is that it doesn’t always do justice to the topics I want to explore.

Meanwhile, the past few weeks have been pretty busy, so I’ve zoomed out to reconsider my publishing activities. I realised that from a business perspective, engaging on LinkedIn delivers more value:

• I get more feedback quicker.
• Posts get distributed to people outside my immediate network.
• Posts are way faster to produce.

Of course, posting on LinkedIn is also somewhat infuriating:

• Given the way the feed works, easy-to-digest content is rewarded.
• Engagement rates can be lower than with email – people who follow me don’t necessarily see my posts.
• Short-form posts are difficult to link to, and they exist solely at the mercy of the LinkedIn platform.

Another issue is that my writing themes don’t feel sufficiently consistent for a weekly mailing list. LinkedIn is much more forgiving of incongruous themes than email: Followers are unlikely to see content they don’t find engaging, thanks to The Algorithm.

Therefore, despite the common advice to stick to a regular publishing schedule, I decided to ditch consistency when it comes to my website and mailing list. I’ll still publish articles here, but only when I feel like longer-form writing is warranted. If you have something specific you want to read about, please let me know. In the meantime, I’ll keep using LinkedIn as my main venue for posting. See you there!

If you’re not regularly doing an audit of your time and trying to knock things off that list that don’t matter, you’re probably wasting a lot of time on things that don’t matter.