Tool for the Job

Choosing a blogging platform

Over the past 2 years, I have steadily added ideas to my “to write about” list. I have, however, written nothing. 

Each weekend, I would sit down to write something and then remember that I still had not set up a receptacle for this writing. Writing is fun; choosing blogging software is not.

The process was hung up on a lot of decisions that were distractions from the whole point of this exercise (which is to build the habit of writing regularly). In software development, I subscribe to the philosophy that you should identify the piece of what you are building that is a key differentiator and spend time writing that code. Then, try to find outside tools to handle the rest. 

In this case, the writing (one hopes) is the differentiator. Spending time on areas outside of that (e.g. selecting a platform to use, picking a theme, choosing a domain name) was painful. I was particularly paralyzed by aesthetics. While there was no choice that I was likely to make that would be a positive differentiator, I certainly could have picked something so awful that it was a distraction from the content. 

Ironically, the least important decisions took the longest to make because I so deeply desired to not spend time on them at all. In project

management parlance, my behavior had transformed these decisions that should have been both low effort and low value into those that were high effort but still low value.

I’m over it. This weekend I decided to pick the path of least resistance. Substack is both very easy to set up and very free. Of the tools out there, it is the fastest way to deliver value (i.e. published writing). Perhaps the most valuable feature in Substack so far is that its defaults are all fine. No additional aesthetic choices needed. Now I can focus on writing.