Fast, Good, or Cheap

I’m in a retrospecting mood today.  I want to reflect on the disciplines that I wanted to keep. One of them is this blog. I have been blogging since 2006¹.  I’ve been struggling to rationalize and justify the reason to go on with it.

Then it hits me.

I’ve been slowly raising the standards of my writing. It’s no longer about writing instantly whatever is on my mind.²  It’s now about collecting my thoughts and ideas on any single topic, and spruced them up with links that I’ve researched along the way.  Over the years, I’ve came to realize blogging suddenly took a lot of effort!

Then there’s the problem of feedback. I have very few followers of this blog (thanks, Steve! 🙂 ). It’s hard to gauge how my efforts are being evaluated. So the gratification level of blogging went down in the past few years.

I’ve considered many times to just abandon this blog and just go do micro blogging on Tumblr.  People do (myself included) have a very short attention span. They’ll only respond to pictures or videos. They’ll sometimes respond to sensational/weird headlines, but even then it’s not a sure thing.

Perhaps this Project Triangle says it all:

“Pick Any Two: Fast, Good, or Cheap.”

I can do it fast and good, but I’ll need to pay other people to help me write.

I can do it fast and cheap, but I doubt it’ll be good – at least not all the time.

I can do it good and cheap, but it’s definitely going to take time. This is pretty much the mode I’m in right now.  I’m the only writer and I try my best to make it good.

So, with the world, nowadays, going at lightning speed, hungry for quality stuff, and want everything free, what can this part-time blogger do?

Photo Credit: Christian

1. But the whole blogging mania started around 2001 [↩]
2. I’ve got the social networks like Facebook and Twitter for that. [↩]

Tags: discipline, habit, writing