Most blogs die after a few months. Its a fact of life. Some people think it is a matter of writers block – or Bloggers Block in this case – and you can find a lot of great articles on how to find inspiration for your blog and battle BlogBlock.
My guess (and experience) isn’t that people run out of inspiration or things to write about. I think the reason they stop blogging is because of the Hiatuses Increasing Aversion Effect.
This is how it works; let assume you post 3 articles, every day. Then you miss a day or two. Instinctively you feel that your next post should make up for the lost posts and better be pretty interesting. This raises the bar for your next post so you decide to think about it for an extra day. The next day you want to post something again but this time you have an even greater responsibility to write a good post! And the longer you wait, the higher you feel the expectations will be. In other words: The Hiatuses Increasing Aversion Effect.
Guess I overcame that one…
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6 Responses to “Hiatuses Increasing Aversion Effect”
Very, very true.
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You said it chief! Also, when a post becomes succesful, I don’t like ketting it of the frontpage too soon. This creates a block as well. In times of RSS syndiaction, perhaps quality is better then quanitity, but I guess one need to write a lot of garbage to reach some form of quality as well…
I just started my own blog and will try to avoid this HIAE phenomena. To prevent it from happening I already wrote a bunch of post about general subjects, which are now waiting to be published. This allows me to not post anything for a few days or even weeks without panicking.
True. This makes me think of the ‘Getting Things Done’ Method. The more is on your mind, the less is getting done :-)
Great blog, Boris. It is engaging and informative. I like the infusion of tongue-in-cheek humor. The post about cat chasing mouse got me here. A nice mix of content.
Jim