Slowing down the pace

When there is time to start, there is also time to stop.  I remember my college English professor's definition of self control.

Self control is knowing what to do, when to do it, when to stop, and doing it.

It's little over two and half years since I've started blogging on Future of Social Network.  Starting January 2012, I've committed myself to write every single day to improve my writing and get in the rhythm of daily writing routine.  Just like I've decided to write every single day on the spur of the moment, I have decided to slow down my blogging schedule.

Instead, I plan to blog once a week.  I want to try this schedule for a few reasons:

1. Be more deliberate on what topic to post.

One thing that I learned in the past 15 months of blogging every day was the difficulty in writing when I have trouble choosing a topic.  There have been many days when I sat in front of empty monitor and stared at the blinking cursor for half an hour trying to come up with something worthwhile to write about.  I originally started writing about social networks and their trends, but I rather quickly ran out of interesting things to say about what's happening once I started doing it every single day.

Since then, I have expanded my blogging topics to include product management, startups and interesting bloggers to follow.  Even then I remember forcing myself awake to scribble something down.  Often topic was decided to fill in the gap instead of choosing one that I felt would be meaningful for the blog.

I want to change that now.  I want to be more deliberate about what topic that I talk about.  I want to allow myself more time to choose something that I think makes sense for this blog.

2. Increase my writing efficiency.

It was not always hard slogging to write a blog, however.  Sometimes it only takes enough time to type out my thoughts.  Words just flows out from my head through my shoulders, arms and fingers, and ends up on the screen.  They fill up before realizing that there were enough materials to write something about in a blog.  That is what I would call being "in the zone."

When in the zone, it's so easy, fast and efficient to write things down, it is easily 10x more efficient writing a blog.  I found that to be in the zone, I have to know what I want to write and get the skeleton down so that I can quickly flesh them out to make a cohesive argument.  I want to write like this more often and increase my writing efficiency.

3. Allocate time to pick up coding again.

I also want to spend more time writing code.  I have been thinking about a few worthwhile open projects to start.  Cataloging interesting bloggers to follow, helping enterprise transition from email to collaboration platform, and creating a open platform where inefficiencies and improvement areas can be reported and shared are a few that I've been thinking a lot about.  Each of them I've started to tackle in a small way, but I want to spend a bit more time so that I can actually use them to improve my own life.

Hopefully picking up coding will give me new materials to write about.  Already I have collected a few helpful tips to share on Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.0.  Maybe I'll write about what I learned from doing some hacking.

So, there you have it.  It's a bit of bittersweet for me to move on to the next phase of Future of Social Network.  I feel a bit sentimental about the fact that I won't be able to track my progress with daily blog post.  But at the same time I am excited by the prospect that I will have more time to work on my open projects.

In the end the goal of Future of Social Network stays the same.  It will continue to be about social networks, product management, startups and blogs.  Now that I have more time, you may find an entry or two about coding as well.