Habit Formation

Executive summary:  Do not read this post.  Come back tomorrow.  You are warned.

I have heard it said that an activity must be carried out daily for six week to become an ingrained habit.  Well, I haven't reached six weeks yet on these daily blog entries, but I know that they have not yet become anything near an ingrained habit.  I was sitting here at my desk with 13 minutes until midnight, when I really should already be asleep after being sick the last few days.  I was just about to call it a day, and realized that I've not written anything today.  I referred to my list of pending ideas (currently a bit thin, I should work on that tomorrow) and didn't see anything I wanted to write about (in 11 minutes or less) so here I am making stuff up off the cuff, and writing a lot of run-on sentences.

Should I, on these days when I'm neither inspired nor particularly interested, even bother writing something?  That depends a lot on what I think the purpose of this writing is.  If I had any delusions that I had a large regular audience (Hi Dad!) I might go for quality over quantity, and make my adoring public wait an extra day in between.  But it's not all about you, people.  The point of this exercise from the start has largely been about writing on deadline, cranking text out quickly, getting something out every day (more or less) and not being too picky about the quality (or incredibly self-referential, pseudo-intellectually quasi-post-modernist bent) of the writing.

I must admit, the 230+ page views that I got for last Tuesday's entry about blood donation did give me a little shot of adrenaline.  People actually read my words.  Maybe I could come up with even more words that even more people would want to read.  And maybe I'll even try to do that someday yet.  I do have a few tricks up my sleeve.  But today is not that day.  Today you get this.  See, I told you not to read it.