“you don’t manage what you don’t measure”, “a watched pot never boils”
#shagility
People often ask me how I manage to write so often, its an easy process for me now, if I have an idea that pops into my head and that idea interests me (or annoys me) I stop what I am doing and write about it.
I write for a max of 10 or 15 min and then I am done. As you can probably tell, I don’t do a lot of editing or reviews of that writing, I learnt that if I do that I never finish writing those thoughts.
I still have a shit ton of notes with bullet points of ideas that will never be completed or published (that writing pattern didn’t work for me).
I find that quickly writing my thoughts down, helps me organisae them, helps me discover potential patterns in those ideas over time. So I primarily write for myself.
But it would be fair to say I also enjoy it when other people read what I write, when they enter into discussion on those thoughts and ideas and patterns.
So every now and again I would have a quick look at my linkedin stats for what I write to see if there are any themes that seem to get more engagement. Any hints in the data on what people find interesting. It didn’t change what I wrote about, the ideas that pop into my head are random and based on what I am working on, who I am working with, what I am reading and listening to.
That was until my follower count hit approx 4,800 and then I got fixated.
There is something about a follower number of 5K. Why is it different to 500, 1,500, 2,500 etc, no idea (and it probably isn’t)
But at 4,800 ish I found I started to check my follower count most days to see if it had hit the magical 5K.
It has become a vanity metric.
It intrigues me that I have become beholden to that vanity metric behaviour.
So beholden that I just spent 10 minutes writing about it.
I can pretend I feel better writing this than if I wrote the typical “I have 5,000 followers thank you all” as my follow awards acceptance speech.
But I don’t.
That ticker will tick over the 5k mark sometime today or tomorrow, i’m going to try my best to no longer check it, and go back to focusing on writing about what interests and/or annoys me.
