perfectionism

My relationship with blogging, part 2

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As I wrote a few months ago, I have a difficult relationship with blogging. In short: I start, after a few months I think what I wrote is silly, and then I get rid of it. This time I promised myself and the internet that I wouldn’t do this. I made no promises about posting great content or posting often, just that I would accept my posts they way they are.

I dare to say that it’s actually going quite OK! I think the thing that is different this time is being on Twitter:

  • I read more blog posts in general, which helps me improve my writing and gives me ideas on what to write about.
  • I realized there are a lot of people struggling with writing, and that ways to improve your writing (such as doing it, as I am doing now!) are a good thing.
  • I connect with more researchers, and am slowly starting to realize my posts might be useful to others

As part of “blog relationship therapy”, I decided to also be more accepting of posts from my earlier blog – the posts I decided were silly in one way or another, and eventually led to that blog’s doom. I’ve resurrected a couple of them. They are mostly about “first” experiences as a PhD student, such as preparing for a lecture or writing a proposal. Enjoy!

My relationship with “save for later”

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Just like blogging, using “save for later” is another thing I have trouble with. I come across a lot of awesome things online, from articles to interesting blogs to cat furniture ideas. Despite having access to several tools to organize such gems (from “Like” on Twitter, to Evernote to Pinterest), I am not really happy with my current setup. I do save things “to read later” in various ways, but the “later” part almost never happens.

Perhaps the only exception to this rule is how I deal with research papers relevant to my projects. When I come across a relevant paper, usually through a Google scholar alert, I immediately include it in the ShareLateX project on that topic. Perhaps that part by itself requires some explanation: I start a ShareLateX project very early on for each topic I am working on, and eventually that document grows into a paper. Here is a screenshot of my most recent projects:
sharelatex_projects

For me this is a foolproof way to remember these relevant papers. I do not forget my projects, and when I pick one of them, either to brainstorm what to do next or to write parts up, I WILL scan, then possibly print and read those papers.

I’ve thought about the differences between this system, and what I do with all the other articles, blogs, etc that I save for later (and that I’m too embarrassed to make a screenshot of). There are really only two that I could think of:

  • The place. For other types of content (anything that is not an article not related to my research) I use the bookmarks folder, Evernote (if related to research in general, academia, personal development), Pinterest (if related to food, exercise, travel). As you can guess, none of these places are places I review every so often.
  • The purpose. The research articles have a clear purpose: “read, summarize and reference in this paper”. Most of the other content I save could probably be labeled as “might be interesting once I get around to it”, which is not really a purpose. The current way I try to organize all those items is by topic, such as “machine learning” or “productivity”. Each topic will include items I’ve already reviewed and saved for some reason, or those I still want to read. Perhaps categories such as “read if bored on the train”, “use as reference in grant proposal”, “write about in blog post” would be more effective.

And those categories are actually something I will try to implement this year! The last one in particular should be interesting: I really dread organizing my favorites, and I find it difficult to decide on blog post topics — so, why not try an approach that has already worked for me elsewhere and kill two birds with one stone? I just need to decide on the place – ShareLateX does not seem really appropriate this time. Don’t forget to check in later to see the results!

My relationship with blogging

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I have a love-hate relationship with blogging. I have always enjoyed having some sort of website. When I was 10 or so, my dad showed me how to build websites in HTML, and I made a website about the Spice Girls. There was no original content on the website, but the fact that I had a website and could update it if I wanted, that’s what counted for me. Of course, when I got a bit older and became embarrassed by my choice of music, the website stopped existing. In high-school, I got a bit more interested in webdesign. Blogs were becoming popular, and since I didn’t have any particular hobbies, I made a website with a blog about what was happening in my life. You can already probably guess what happened… I got older, decided my problems from a year or two before were very silly, and that website disappeared as well. Which is too bad, because now I would find it interesting to see how I thought about things in 2004.

In university I had a break from websites and blogging, probably because my desire to “do something with websites” was satisfied by my part-time job. But when I started working on my MSc thesis, something started nagging at me again. I was learning more about doing experiments, reading and writing papers, and wanted to share my thoughts. Perhaps that was the first time I felt that I had content worth sharing, so I started a blog again. In the end, I often felt obliged to post “something”, which resulted in rather uninteresting posts. This also happened during my PhD – I got inspired by website such as PhDTalk, but my attempts were never really quite successful, because I didn’t spend enough time on them. Again, my earlier posts just seemed silly to me, especially after some major changes in my life. My website was offline once again.

As a postdoc, I’ve started reading more and more academic blogs, and since a few months, I even have a Twitter account. So again, I want to have a blog, and I regret not doing a good job with the other ones. But a difference between regretting getting rid of your website in 2004, and getting rid of your website in 2014, is that I’ve been with the same host for the past 5 years or so, and could recover any content that I posted. So, I have decided to resurrect my blog a little bit, including posts from earlier editions. I’m not making any promises about how often I will post this time, but I will try to keep myself from going through the whole delete-regret cycle. Stay tuned!

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