Thinking about doing
Restarting my personal website was on my list for quite some time now, but, you know, life happened. When Tobias van Schneiders e-mail “Thinking about doing” arrived, it pretty much hit the nail on the head regarding my stagnant blogging plans.
Tobias runs the Reading Club, that you can join for free here. In his bi-weekly email on the topics of design, psychology and productivity he shares some highly valuable insights. In issue № 187 there was something right for me.
In short, Tobias writes about the fact, that many people fail to actually do those things they have in mind. Instead, they find themselves being trapped in a circle of thinking, planning, strategizing, researching, and finally starting all over again.
He totally touched a sore point when he wrote:
I have some friends who have been stuck in this loop for years. Per example: Some of them are talking about creating and writing a blog. They’ve been talking about it for, I’m not kidding, 10 years now. Every year, sometimes multiple times per year I have a conversation with them, because they’re once again researching the best blogging software, designing some random layouts and doing everything possible to procrastinate on the actual goal: Writing a blog.
Welcome to the club!
To be honest, I’m waiting for far to long now and I’ve been through all those excuses: Important client work, family time, re-re-re-doing the design, searching for the best possible typeface ever™, “no-one will ever read this …”, and so on.
In the end, all of this is a great strategy to avoid pushing that publish button.
The heck with it, I just pushed it and off we go. All I needed was a fresh Kirby installation, a few dabblings in the admin and some basic HTML and CSS stuff. A proper design is missing, typefaces are defaults, no logo yet, no really site structure, no “about” page, and what else is missing. It doesn’t matter. I’m not sure what’s going on here in the future and that’s ok. At least, I have started. And as Marc Thiele puts it:
Are people interested in what I am going to write? Who is going to read what I write? You know what? It doesn’t matter. I am writing this down for me. If you find something useful, something inspiring and/or enjoy reading: perfect!