Catching up

I've been working on fixing my recent falling behind, and after some time trying to muddle through it I've realised a few things. Firstly, when I get into the red I think I need to return to green as soon as possible. Secondly, I don't think I should ever try to catch up on writing.

I originally said I was going to set a cadence of one birdpost and one regular post per day, but I ultimately found that unsatisfying and counterproductive. When I'm behind, being slightly less behind is hard to frame as a victory. I can do the work to fix things and make extra posts and so on, but none of that changes the feeling that I'm still behind. Being behind can be a powerful (negative) motivator, but only temporarily; once it becomes a permanent state of affairs it tends to just be demoralising. The other thing is it sets me up for "what the hell"-style problems; I'm behind already so missing another one doesn't seem like a big deal.

As far as not catching up on writing, what I mean is really the same thing I said in Atonement: what I planned to do is gone, and I need to stop pretending I can still do it now that it's in the past. I can do something else instead, and maybe that something else will be better than nothing, but it's still not the original thing. So if I try to write something that day and I fail, then I don't write anything that day. I can still post something in its place, birdposts, failure posts, whatever satisfies my desire to fill the space with something. However, the chance to write something that day is gone, and trying to write extra posts back in time is just confusing the situation.

So my resolution is that whenever I get behind I will attempt to get un-behind as quickly as possible by filling the intervening space with whatever, but I'll keep writing posts as normal while doing that. These two things are separate, and I think keeping them that way will stop them from interfering with each other; regular posts won't use the same resources as backfilling, and the writing habit can exist independently from the work of keeping the posts up to date.

Sorry if you're not into birds, I suspect there are a few more of them than you would like in my post history now, but things should be back to normal shortly.