To Count or Not To Count?

Herb’s blog, Herbdate 22082-652:
I’ve been noticing that several of the bloggers I follow number their posts. I’m thinking about doing that but I haven’t decided on a good system yet. As you may recall, almost 11 months and 13 days or 348 days ago, I declared that I was going to post something every single day for the rest of whatever time I am allotted on earth and able to blog. From that time until now I have made 351 posts which leaves me three days ahead. If I do enough extra posts I can take a vacation, maybe? Nah, I enjoy doing it and the discipline of doing it every day has been good for me.

The thing is, how do I want to number them? I have a couple of different ways to go about it. The most direct, of course, would be to just start at the beginning, but when I started the streak seems like such a significant point, that it should be number 1. But that doesn’t feel right, either. I overthink a lot of things and this appears to be one of them. But, like today there are two posts, which is unusual for me, but would one be 352a and this 352b? Or would I do it by the actual day number, for instance, this is day 203 of 2020, so, 203a and 203b? Then how to differentiate the year? Maybe use a Julian style date like we used in the shop office in the Army? Year and day, today would be 2020203 but last year July 21 would have been 2019202 (because of leap year this year.). Well, it could be written as 20203 and 19202. So 20203a or 20203-1?

Something, perhaps unrelated and perhaps slightly more important, has come up, though. Okay, so, I’ve mentioned here before that I follow the blog of a guy named Seth Godin. He’s the one who inspired the whole blogging everyday thing for me. I don’t think he meant to, exactly, he was just making a point, but I took it seriously. Well, the other day he challenged my mind again. In a post called The 100 Hour Asset, he makes the statement that “If you invest 100 hours in a rare skill, you’re likely to acquire it.” He goes on to say that if you spend a thousand hours, just twenty hours a week for a year, learning something and you are in a whole different category. I have tried and tried to shake this message and I can’t quite get rid of the notion.

There are a lot of things I like. What if I devoted that amount of time to something? How many hours would it really take to do some of the things I want to learn?

42 Comments

  1. Starting the numbering back from hundreds of posts must take a long time to do, in my opinion. Or is there a feature I am unaware of? I hear WP . org gives you more options than wp . com. (Left spaces as Askimet doesn’t like l i n k s).

    • I’m with you, Petra! WordPress already ‘numbers’ posts; it pops the year/month/day in the URL automagically, and I’m a lazy type, adding more numbers seems like overkill.

      Having said that, I do like the ‘Herbdate’, though: it’s quirky, imaginative and distinctive. Not necessarily in that order 🙂

  2. I’ve been writing posts every day since February 2011. It was a decision I made on my own, because I know that if I slack off, it is a pain to reengage with a constructive practice. This is not something I do in the pursuit of kudos. It’s more or less a mental exercise in discipline.

    • Wow, I’m impressed! Hmm… Presumably your daily posts aren’t all on the same site? Blue Jay Blog doesn’t appear to have a post every day. Or am I missing something?

      BTW you may want to investigate why your blog is currently inaccessible via https: I’m getting “An error occurred during a connection to http://www.bluejayblog.com. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR”.

  3. All the “fancy” ways of being “professional” in blogging just doesn’t appeal to me. I like the simple way of doing things.

    But you should really take a vacation… that would be cool… and take your followers with you…..🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

  4. You got me curious…
    I had a little over a year going until last July and a kidney stone knocked me out for a week…So far I’ve posted every day since July 9, 2019, until today…which if the internet doesn’t lie…which we know it never does… that would be 378 days.

    It does take a lot of discipline.

    • First, thanks for taking the time to visit and comment. You’re right. But, as I told someone, I think the discipline is good for me.

      • My pleasure Herb. The discipline is good for me also.
        I started off doing a post a month…then I realized…I have to give it my all if it was going to work…I’ve learned a lot about myself doing it.

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