Every year, I promise to write at least one blog post a month, but EVERY SINGLE TIME that commitment only lasts for a while.
It’s not that I don’t try; for example, I published four blog posts last year, and this is the fifth this year, but sooner or later, I give up.
Excuses
I found multiple excuses for this:
- English is not my primary language
- I don’t have time with two daughters
- I don’t have time with a full-time job
- I’m exhausted during the weekend, and I struggle to find the motivation
Life
The truth is that while all the above’s are true, I have to admit that part of it is laziness, and part of it is having other priorities, and I’m ok with it; I WANT to:
- spend some time watching tv shows
- spend time on the weekend playing with my daughters
- spend time in the evening reading the news and writing some code
- spend time in the late evening reading some books
Obstacles
Last month I decided to try it again, and I soon realized that something else was slowing me down.
You know when you want to go to the gym, but the idea of preparing the bag, changing, finding the right shoes, and leaving your comfy home, holds you back?
It is the same for me; I want to write a blog post but:
- write the blog post in pure markdown,
- pass it through Grammarly
- test that images are rendered correctly
- ensure that the formatting is right
make me postpone the publishing of a post multiple times.
2022 update
That’s why I decided to change my process. I realized that Notion could be an excellent tool for drafting blog posts.
Notion is free for personal use and gives you a pleasant online editor in the style of Medium to write your notes and blog posts.
So this is my process now:
- https://notion.so
- Start a new blog post
- Quickly write the whole blog post with the right formatting and images
- Export the blogpost in markdown (with images included)
- Load the text in Grammarly
- Add it to Hugo
- Push it to GitHub
This is the second blog post I have written with the process above, and it seems to work better than before; only time will tell if I’ll be more consistent with this new process.
You don’t need to copy and past content to Grammarly.
I know I don’t have to, but I prefer to consciously decide what to share and not share with Grammarly instead of sharing everything I write by default with them.
I could write another blog post about my policy on handling my data online.