The PMO View

Viewers will notice there has been a gap between my earlier posts and this one. The reason for this is simply due to the nature of blogging. Blogging I realized is not a sprint but a marathon. So what this means is that posting every week, at least in my opinion, has the danger of diluting the quality of both the writing and the topics.

I do enjoy writing about project management and the trials and tribulations of the field. However, this blog started to become more like work versus something that I started out enjoying. I actually thought about just letting the blog die because it became ‘not fun’. To put this into perspective, while the following is several years old, I feel if it was done again today the results would be pretty close to the same.

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?_r=0 , 5^th paragraph

As I would rather not fall into the 95% group, I realized that I needed to get back to the enjoyment of writing versus trying to meet a goal that no one else cared about but me. In order to do that, I stepped back and re-analyzed why I started this blog in the first place. In business terms, I looked at my business needs and re-evaluated what was going on and took a different direction based on that information. So many people, both in business and their personal lives, start off in a particular direction and, when difficulties occur, try to force themselves down the same path because it is the one they are used to. Without taking the time to look around and see if doing something different would be better or easier. Or better AND easier. 🙂 .

Of course many times changing direction or focus is much harder and even painful than trying to keep going in the current direction. So either the pain and/or the difficulty has to reach a point where change is forced rather than planned which, in the majority of cases, does not end well. This explains why 95% of the people who start blogging stop. It was difficult to continue to write when very few people were reading it. Caused pain because no one cared about what they were writing, usually something the blogger is passionate about. So they changed direction by stopping. While a valid decision, this is not what I wanted to do.

So I will continue to post on an irregular basis. Of course if my readership explodes then I will do the same thing as I did here and re-analyze the situation and adjust accordingly.