I used to tell my buddy Marc – on a regular basis – that the day I could no longer update my blog regularly (back then it was daily, later every other day) that it would mean there’s a problem. Of course, I didn’t really mean problem-problem in the sense of illness, home issues, etc. More along the lines of: if I can’t update, then there’s been a loss of control in my life.
This really did hold true for the longest time and became impacted with the advent of FaceBook. FB became fun and the idea of interacting with so many friends on a regular basis was really cool. Until I realized that it was very much interfering with my blogging (and too many other activities). I pulled back from FB and it helped a little.
And then I actually got to thinking about how much I enjoyed some of those FB interactions, and realized how some of those status updates were about events that I would have loved to have kept somewhere more permanent. Like my blog. Sure, this may just be bits and bytes on the internet, but I use this blog offline as well, archiving it in a specific fashion. Using Twitter and the widget to post those tweets just wouldn’t work for me. It’s not enough to just fart out a status. I want a bit more than that – especially now with some of the things going on in my personal life (which would normally get posted privately).
That, of course, got me to update even less on FB but the underlying issue still remained. All the things I wanted to post about… I never had time to do so. Go back to paragraph 1. There is a problem. For me to not have time to sit back and reflect on certain items in my life is just wrong. To constantly be on-the-go rushing from deadline to deadline to appointment to appointment… does not a happy Mike make.
Plus, reflecting on things always allowed me to see and plan what I needed to do/ get to in order to feel like I was moving “forward” if not “ahead”. Forward in my plans, ahead in my progression (and to be clear, I’m not talking about day-job stuff. that gets taken care of IN the dayjob).
So where does this leave me? With plenty to say and very little time to say it in. What options do I have? That’s what I’m trying to look at. Is this somewhat similiar to the “move” off of private bases on Bulletin Board Systems (interacting) to blabbering on a blog (pushing)? Are we at the phasing-out of the blogging and moving onto the sound-biting? Well, we’re definitely in a big change, that’s for sure. And as with anything new, we’ll have to take it one experience at a time until we re-find our footing.
For me, I’m just going to have to properly commit my time so the important events I need to keep, I will.