It’s been close to a year since I last wrote a blog post. My aim was to post much more frequent updates but I guess such a vague goal was bound to fail. If I already acquired this habit of writing posts, it would have been fine to be that relaxed but going forward, I’ll be more specific in my goals.

My blog is not the only thing I have neglected in the meantime. I wrote a post about handling tableviews back in October last year. I ported my TableViewManager to Swift long ago, but I didn’t work on making it open-source. It was a combination of perfectionism and laziness that prevented me from doing so. I thought I should make it easier to use for other people. In retrospect, it would have been better to have some imperfect output rather than no output at all. By the end of October, I will put some version of it on Github.

I am hoping to make blogging a foundation for maintaining good habits and It would be naive to go in without a plan, or at least principles to guide me.

First principle: “Have specific goals”. I already mentioned this, but this is worth repeating. So far, I avoided setting specific goals in my life because life is messy. There are too many variables, so you don’t have a 100% control on your life. But it is better to fail & learn rather than being non-committal. Also there is truth in the saying “Shoot for the stars and you’d make it to the moon”. As far as the blog goes my goals is to write a blog post at least once a week.

Second principle: “Don’t indulge in perfectionism”. Perfectionism can be a powerful driving force for improving the quality of your output, but it can also be paralyzing. It can make simple tasks needlessly complicated. Also in many cases it is downright unrealistic and arrogant. For example, this blog post have been terrible so far. It doesn’t flow at all. But having neglected writing for a whole year, it is a bit stupid to spend hours after hours writing the perfect post. Perfectionism can come later down the line when I have been writing weekly blog posts for several months. After all my goal is to “write a blog post” not “write a good blog post”.

A common thread that I see in these principle is fear of failure. The thing is I have not felt that much anxiety in several years. To wait and see rather that act, is bad habit I have indulged in for years. Hopefully this process will help me break it.

Two principles should be fine for now. Lets see what else pops up. Going to need some topics for the future anyway. Maybe something about planning a specific action to go along with the specific goals.