Ok, I hear you guys. Especially the guy in the back, all pumped up, ready to write 10 posts each morning, to comment on 20 blogs in his lunch break and rock the world in the evening. I hear what you say: “A blog hiatus? As bloggers, aren’t us supposed to write day and night? Are you I-N-S-A-N-E? “. Nope, as strange as it may seem, I’m not insanse. In fact, I’m better than ever, although my blog activity took a plunge in the last month or so.
But it was a good thing. Ok, “good” and “bad” may have different meanings based on your cultural background, religion, life philosophy and a number of other, possibly unrelated, reasons. Let’s not use “good” or “bad”. Let’s use “healthy” instead of “good”. Yeap, my blog hiatus turned to be a really healthy thing. Without further ado, here’s why.
1. You Need Time To Refine Your Message
If you write each and every day, you may lose sight of the big picture. It’s true, the habit of writing each and every day is an amazing asset. It makes you productive and ready to go whenever you’re hit with inspiration. But at the same time, it makes you repetitive and a little bit anxious. What am I going to write about today? Am I going to be inspired?
I’m sure that each and every blogger hit the “blogging burnout”. I know I hit it more than once. It’s a tough game, that blogging burnout. In my experience, it’s the closest thing to depression I know. It’s like you’re out of options, which, of course, it’s never true. You always have an option, but sometimes, when enough is enough, you just don’t see those options clearly.
As in fitness, the muscle is built during the rest time, not during the effort.
2. You Are Involved In Other Projects
And that’s fine too. During the last few months, two of my projects took the lead. One is iAdd, which grew way over my initial expectations, from a proof of concept to a stable-and-almost-mainstream iPhone / iPad (and soon Mac) app, and the other is my newly born baby, WPSumo. If you followed closely my social media stream, you know what WPSumo is.
But if you didn’t, let me start by saying that this is the biggest project I embraced since I sold my company, two and a half years ago. It’s a wordpress framework packed with tons of features. I’m only one third of it, the other two being taken by two wordpress wizards. We launched last Friday and we’re still pumped up with all the enthusiasm. I will write extensively about this framework in the next few weeks, so stick around.
So, although I’ve been a little bit quiet in writing, my blogging activities were actually enhanced.
3. You Want To Evaluate Your Work
During the last two months my blog had a significant surge in traffic. In simpler words, the number of people who are visiting DragosRoua.com is now constantly in the 120.000 – 130.000 area. And that’s a steady flow, not based on some volatile circumstance. I actually feel that I entered another level.
And this requires a little bit of analysis. I’m not talking only about extracting data from the statistics, although I started to do it more seriously during the last few weeks (and identified some very interesting patterns) but also about my main vision and next steps.
You cannot clearly see where you’re going if you don’t stop every now and then on a higher cliff.
4. You Write Somewhere Else
Exactly, one of the reasons I wrote less on my blog it’s because I started to write more on other blogs. I became a regular contributor to Stepcase Lifehack. Interestingly enough, my first article there, 7 Not So Obvious Habits To Maximize Productivity, got a lot of attention and I’m really happy about this.
It’s a completely different experience for me. It’s one thing to do a little bit of guest posting, and another to be a regular contributor to a mainstream blog. At this moment, Stepcase Lifehack has more than 80.000 subscribers. I am quite enthusiastic about this and I will try a few different approaches and writing styles.
Will see how this goes, but for now, it’s a nice new toy. 🙂
5. You Just Need A Break
One of the biggest traps of personal development is to aim for perfection. Perfection is boring, being better is where all the fun is. So I’m not afraid to admit that I just need a pause from time to time. I’m not a writing machine, nor do I want to become one. Sometimes I just want to leave the work behind and enjoy life a little bit. Or a little bit more.
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So, here are the 5 reasons that made my blogging hiatus quite useful and healthy. Now that you’ve read this, go back and continue writing on your blog. 🙂
Thanks for the article. I especially agree that you need to take a break to refine your message. It is better to write one good blog than 10 blogs written in a hurry without a lot of thought into it.
This was a good post. It makes one feel less bad about about taking a break from blogging at times to focus on a few other priorities.. Great stuff!
Last week I take a week break from my blogging after the ending of my study. Yeah, just finish my final semester – Final Year Project.
At that moment, most of my times would be focus on my project on building a website which took me a lot of effort to learn and effort.
And I’m back now. 😀
You’re right Dragos, we’re not writing machine, it’s my passion to write, not write for the sake of updating blog.
I guess it would quite different from update blog merely for updating and write something really valuable and informative that worth our reader’s time.
Quality over quantity. =D
I have taken many breaks from blogging, some far too long! But I agree, breaks are very necessary from time to time. You should never feel forced to write something. Writing is about freedom and creativity, at least for the good blogs anyway!
Hi Dragos,
Really cool to hear that your blog is getting so much traffic! I’m happy for you:)
Good luck with the WP Sumo launch, from what I can see it looks fantastic! I hope it gets as big as Thesis!
Cheers buddy
Diggy
Thanks buddy, and looking forward for your help too on that WPSumo domination alliance 🙂
As for the blog readers, I still try to figure that out. There are a few factors that created this: the long tail, my SU posts (still doing good there) and inbound links (which started to double almost each month). But as I told you, I’m still figuring it out. Bottom line is: if you write,m they’ll come 🙂
I think taking a break is one of the best ways to refresh yourself, so you can come back with a more creative mind.
Amen to that 🙂
I think taking a blog hiatus can be the best thing for your site. The last one I took was for two months near the end of 2008, and when I got back to it in 2009, I found a new purpose and focus for my site and it really grew from there. While it may seem counter productive, and you may lose some followers because of it, what you’ll gain will be much more worth while.
My point exactly, Kristi 🙂
I have been writing for about 18 months now and I have gone back and forth on how much to write. I started out writing once a day (I think this is good for new bloggers since it gets them a lot of content on their site and helps them practice writing) I then went to every other day then to every third next I increased to 3 per week and now I am back to every day.
This whole writing trip has been essential to my growth.
It has taken time to learn to write this much after the initial spurt of ideas ran out.
But once I had written for about 1 year it became a habit and all of a sudden I had to many ideas, I needed to get rid of them so I started increasing my schedule again.
Now I write more than ever and it is really, really easy.
Well, great to hear that and I’m happy for you. But I still need my blog hiatus every few years 🙂