It has been seven weeks now since I began this practice on April 1. This will be my 42nd post in 54 days. Checking in on my hypotheses from my first post:
I will benefit from the ritual awareness, measured by feeling glad that I did it.
Very much so - I plan to continue making this a regular practice and also to refine and diversify the goals of my writing. Sometimes it has felt edgy for me, more often it has helped me have and improve thoughts that would have been otherwise delayed or non-existant, sometimes it's been a useful platform for linking to, and sometimes I think I just like to hear myself talk.
I will benefit from the record, measured by me re-reading at least some of what I wrote at least once.
More yes than no, but not quite in the way I expected. I did not do any chronological read-throughs or general reviews for their own sake, but I did refer back to some posts for their specific contents at later dates. Notably, the fact that I'd taken time to write down those thoughts had caused me to remember those thoughts better, such that I knew that I could go back and check them. It might not be too much longer before I crave some sort of Roam-style topic network to help reify the threads and connections. (Or... maybe I'll just start with refining the tags.)
I will create a few connections, measured by people telling me that they are following along.
Nope! Not that measurement, at least. The GA stats say that there have been zero days in the last month with no pageviews, so there appear to be at least a few people following along (some spread over 4 weeks, though I haven't quite figured out this cohort graph). But no one has identified to me as a follower per se.
As to my intention/goal:
I want to write something down every day for the next six weeks.
I missed days 8 and 11 out of the first 3 weeks, and I didn't hold myself to a rigid "must write every day" sense of obligation. I tried to give myself the space/opportunity to write every day, and I found that I rarely failed to have some kind of thought that I was interested in writing about. My misses were misses of awareness or scheduling, not of interest. Oh, and I will confess here to back-dating a handful of posts by a day even when published the next day, or just to avoid having two with the same date. :shrug:
Looking forward:
I have a bit of interest in doing more actual "journaling", that is, recording more of the events/happenings of my days. I'd want to section that off a bit from the other posts, though - why? Because those would be more of a connected temporal flow. Maybe not? But I do want to give people a way to find the kinds of content they might be interested in here.
Hmm, and come to think of it, it's more the "working in public" style that I'm thinking of here, more than the "the kids and I played X today". I want to practice awareness of "what did I do today" in general, which does include both (or all) types of events. Maybe I should just look at it as "anything meaningful". Ooh, or I could phrase it as "what was my (intentional) work today?" Look out, I might start setting weekly goals next...