Blogging is Harder Than it Looks

When I started this blog, I had two goals.

One, I wanted a creative outlet away from work that would help me to develop some personal discipline. Creative and discipline may not seem like partners, but that’s how my mind works. I wanted to force myself to think a little differently each day. If that came by simply blogging a link to another web page, well, I figured that was a start.

The second goal was to share a few thoughts on my favorite college football team, Alabama, and my favorite sport, college football. Everybody has an opinion, so why keep mine all to myself.

These two goals seemed to go together very well. Take a few minutes out of every day to develop some creative discipline in the form of a blog post. And if that creative discipline focused on Bama, well all the better.

The funny thing is, though, this is a lot harder than it looks. Yeah, you can read the web and post links, but to actually formulate a coherent thought related to what you read can be very hard, at least it is for me. When you add in the time pressures of having a family and career, posting something every day (not to mention something that’s relevant) becomes a lot harder than it appears.

Meanwhile, WordPress has this handy feature called a “Dashboard” which continuously shows your blog stats – i.e. how many people are visiting the site.  When you pay attention to that, it’s really easy to start chasing stats instead of remembering what the goals were.

I started this blog just before last season and managed to post every day until just after the season was over. I that point, I had all I could take. After all, we had just won our second title in three years. How hard is that to analyze?  “We’re No. 1.”  No dispute, end of story, not much to say.  Did I really need to come on here and gloat every day? That’s not my style (most of the time). I’ll be honest, the Krystal incident after the championship game turned my stomach and made me re-think my passion for Alabama football, at least for a while. No, I didn’t think about changing teams or anything like that, but it did make me pause and re-check my priorities.  So when those two factors collided with a very busy work schedule, I decided that maybe the whole world didn’t need to hear from me every day about Alabama football.

So some time has passed and I’m back (like anyone cares).  After some time away and wrestling with whether to delete the entire blog, I decided to not do that.  Instead, I decided to remember my first two goals: use this site as a way to develop some personal discipline and use this site to share some thoughts about college football.