can't procastinate procastination

One of the largely unacknowledged difficulties of keeping a weblog is properly timing your posts: on the one hand, you can only post when you have time, and, on the other hand, a links and commentary weblog must be timely. And by timely, I mean both new and under-blogged; you have to catch a link before it's gone mainstream, and that can happen in the span of several hours.

Throw in depression, outside commitments like oversleeping, and blogging starts to require the reflexes of an athlete. Act fast, or lose the inning. You can collect all the interesting links in the world at 5 am, too tired to paste them in MT, but too guilty over all your various forms of unproductivity to stop reading and fall asleep. But when you wake up at 2 PM and all those people doing under-cover blogging at their workplace snagged your bookmarked links in the AM, you realize: the laziness and procastination-tendencies that originally made blogging so appealing don't make you a good blogger. You can't procastinate procastination. Or you can, but it feels mighty shitty knowing you're too lazy or tired to even do your procastination properly. On that note, I'm going to finally start writing my promised review of the now-untimely Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Posted by nchicha at March 23, 2004 08:55 PM
Comments

So true, Chicha--I find at times that I fall into the trap of a rat race of sorts--trying to get in my comments about the hot link of the day in a timely fashion. But ultimately, I think I'd rather say something well and have the time to think about it than necessarily be first out of the gate. Though it's still nice to do that every so often, of course...

Posted by: Sarah on March 23, 2004 09:32 PM

That's so good, I just wrote a post about it. Rather I pasted your post (with the appropriate attribution, naturally). The question now: Do I post it now to be the ahead of the curve, or do I save it until tomorrow morning so I can hit blog-reading prime time? Will the blogging dilemmas never cease?

Posted by: Ellen on March 23, 2004 09:40 PM

Ellen & Sarah,
Thanks for the truth-verification. I was wondering if the time/timely issue was a problem for others, too.
And Ellen -- I never even thought about withholding posts for high traffic hours. I think that if I sat on posts I'd have too much time to conclude they weren't worth posting after all.

Posted by: Nathalie Chicha on March 24, 2004 02:00 AM

Fortunately quality has some influence, so no matter the time/timing issue, I am inclined to read those blogs that are most gratifying in terms of reading, not just punctuality.

If I thought about this comment I probably wouldn't post it. And for this reason the preview button peturbs me.

Posted by: Matthew on March 24, 2004 07:14 AM

Spot on

Posted by: Saltation on March 31, 2004 02:45 AM
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