The Work Blog

I've been managing to keep up a pretty reliable one-post-per-day rate on my blog at work, a little over a month into the experiment. Regular visitors to this site will no doubt arch an eyebrow at the notion of me congratulating myself on a mere single new entry each day, since I typically do four to five times that output hereabouts. There are several key differentiators that contribute to my belief that a blogging rate like that, at work, is something to be at least a little proud of. First, and least importantly, I'm kicking the butts of any other work bloggers! Our blogroll page includes a snapshot of recent entries, in reverse chronological order (newest first), and of late the top three, four or even five spots have been held by "The Daily Happenings" by your Humble Blogger here. In other words, I'm sometimes three to four times as prolific as the sum total of all the other bloggers at work, even at just one new post each day!

More relevant, though, is the amount of careful thought and deliberation I have to spend in crafting each new work entry. Some of that's similar to what PeterJ wrote of here, in which he described the pains he always goes to when writing. I normally don't approach writing quite that way, as I'm generally happy with a thinner amount of self-editing, trusting in my own initial judgment not to cross too many lines. Where a work blog is concerned, though, I definitely feel the need to be careful. After all, I'm essentially being paid to blog (see my moment of revelation on this front replayed before your very eyes right here); and I'm also representing management and, to some degree, our corporate Agile culture. All of those factors add up to me wanting to word things just right. I feel the weight of the responsibility, you might say, and therefore cranking out several blog postings each day would be quite difficult to do.

Which leads nicely into: I also have a lot of other work to do! Between my current Feature Lead role, and my continuing Agile Manager duties, I generally have enough on my plate to fill an eight or nine hour day quite nicely, even without blogging. If I were bored, or under-utilized, then I suppose I might be blogging up a storm at my desk, but fortunately neither of those descriptions apply.

And so you see - he said - managing to blog once every day at work is nothing to sneeze at, no matter how much it may pale in comparison to the Herculean pace set here.