Burning Myself Out

In January 2018, I launched a shooting podcast I called Short Course.

I had previously co-hosted the Triangle Tactical Podcast for two and a half years, from 2014 through 2016, and I still had the itch. I still had ideas that I wanted to get out there, that I thought could help folks by passing on what I had learned.

So in the closing days of 2017, as I left one job and started another, it felt like the right time to tackle this podcast project I had been rolling around in my head for over a year.

From the very beginning, I held myself to a high standard.

It was a solo show, with episodes about 20 minutes in length. I wanted to have enough material prepared so that I knew I wouldn't run out of content during an episode. Before I even announced the podcast, I recorded five episodes on varying topics to prove to myself that I could talk about multiple different things: current matches, my history in competitive shooting, gear and gear changes I was making, and so on.

I even had a few friends listen to the test episodes and give feedback on the audio mix, which was good because one person told me the bass made the speakers in his car rattle. So I EQed that down until he gave me the thumbs up, and I was ready to launch.

I couldn't have been happier with how that went. I wanted to make a strong impression on people seeing the announcement of this new podcast and give them enough to listen to that it really made an impression in their mind.

After that, I put out an episode every week for 39 consecutive weeks. During those 10 months I interviewed for and got a different job, because the one I had just started turned out to be a terrible fit. At the end of October, I went to Nationals and had a decent showing. And after that, I needed a break.

I took a few months off, and came back at the end of January. Either I was going to produce an episode every week, or not at all. I knew if I didn't keep myself to a rigid schedule I would just trickle out an episode every month or two and I didn't want to waste my time with that. If I was going to do this podcast (for free, in my spare time, for less than a thousand subscribers) then by gosh I was going to take it seriously.

And a little over a month ago, I gave that up. I decided to take another break from the show.

I expected to feel guilty and lazy, but to my surprise it felt like a weight being lifted off my chest. Instead of the weekly production pressures making me dread my three-hour recording session every Thursday night (pretty much my entire evening between cooking dinner and going to bed), I had another evening back. I still had ideas to share that would previously be podcast topics, but I wrote them down to maybe make blog posts out of them for my shooting blog.

In the mean time, I just relaxed. Enjoyed having some pressure taken off. Started practicing more because I had more time. Spent more time thinking and reading in my evenings.

And that's when the idea for this blog came along.

I realized that I am a competent podcaster, but it's not my real home. The audio gear and the fiddling with postprocessing always felt like speaking a foreign language. But the written word, that's where I feel most at home.

And so, with my time freshly freed up from one personal project that I held myself to high standards on, I created an all new personal project to hold myself to high standards on: this blog.

I set up the virtual machine in the cloud to run Ghost. I taught myself how to install it. I started customizing the template. I wrote more than a week's worth of posts to seed the blog with content (the same way I had with the podcast).

And just like with the podcast, I set a standard for myself: one post, every day. It could be a short post, just an aphorism or a quote that I found useful, or a link to an interesting article I'd read. I figured I would sprinkle in the odd long-form post when the spirit moved me.

(As an aside, part of my inspiration for this strategy is Seth Godin's blog where he does more or less this. But that blog is a part of his persona, not to mention marketing for the his various workshops and classes. I'm just a guy writing stuff for fun.)

But regardless, I announced the blog by posting a few links on social media, and settled in to my rhythm of posting something every day. For the first few days, things were pretty much fine.

But then I felt a familiar feeling starting to grow. The feeling that I was doing just enough to get something acceptably good written and posted for the day so I could get on with my evening to do the things I really wanted to spend my time on.

I originally became attuned to this feeling when I was working on the podcast. When the feeling kept growing week after week, it pushed me further and further towards taking a break from the show. When I started the podcast, my intent was that talking things through and explaining them would give me a deeper understanding, the same way that, say, teaching someone else to play guitar or program a computer forces you to understand it more deeply yourself.

But in practice, I found that was rarely happening. Without the inquisitive student asking questions that force you to explain yourself in new ways, just recording the podcast meant I was spending my time trying to just capture my thoughts more than challenge them. And even better if it was on the first take.

I didn't feel like I was really sitting with ideas and examining them and understanding them more deeply. I was just boxing them up and shipping them out. I finally realized that goal of doing the podcast wasn't really being met.

And so, when I started to feel that same thing about this blog a week into running it, I knew something was wrong. Part of the reason I want to write about things here is so that I get a chance to think about them more deeply and refine my understanding of them. But in that first week of posting, that wasn't really happening.

I'd set the posting cadence for myself, so at some point in the evening I would sit down at my computer, look at the drafts that I had in progress, pick the one I thought I could polish up and publish quickly, do just that, and move on with the rest of my evening.

I didn't know what to do to solve this problem, but I knew that what I was doing wasn't working. Wasn't satisfying. Wasn't achieving what I wanted to achieve.

So just like with the podcast, I just stopped. I took a break. I took a step back to examine.

And, just like taking a break from the podcast felt like a weight lifting, I had the same feeling here. I had just spent all this time setting up a new blog and already it was becoming a burden. Surely there had to be a better way.

And, of course, the answer is: no schedule. I write when I want to.

I would like to continue to post links and references to other posts I find interesting. But when I have them, I'll just post them. No trying to bank them and trickle them out one each day. And if I don't have anything to say for a few weeks, fine. The rent on this place is the same whether I post or not.

This might seem like an obvious solution, and in hindsight I suppose it is, but really the progress for me is seeing the pattern in how I do things. I pick a supposed leisure project, whether it's podcasting, blogging, practicing for USPSA, or reading a book, and create an expectation for myself to that thing with regularity, thinking that's the best way to ensure good results.

And what I'm realizing is that putting that amount of structure around a production schedule would be great if this were my actual job. If I were going to make a second career out of podcasting or blogging, knowing that I can sit down and produce quality, if unfulfilling content on a schedule is a good thing to know. But making every hobby into a job is a good way to feel stressed out and insufficient in everything, which is pretty much how I've felt about the podcast and for a little while the blog.

At some level, I was always trying to match print and broadcast media where you write a column or do your show every week whether you have A+ material or not. But those restrictions are based in the physical limitations of reality. Batch printing of newspapers or limited timeslots on scarce radio waves. The internet isn't like that, and treating as though it were has proven to be unsatisfying and unproductive for me.

And so, I'm not doing that anymore.

If the first act of this blog was establishing the pattern and tone, now we're entering the second act. Where I take the time to write longform posts like this, edit them until I'm happy with them, and only then actually publish them. No more deadlines unless I'm getting paid.