Yesterday I spent the entire day implementing a fixed idea. I followed a link from my LinkedIn network to an author’s site who runs an old-school weblog. She calls it “Daily 5 Minutes” and writes what seems to be five-minute stream-of-consciousness entries — long paragraphs about what she’s experiencing or what happened that day. Very personal and direct.
I’m a fan of this format. Since I write daily anyway, I wanted something similar.
First I spent ages wondering whether to do it with Hugo or use a simpler blogging platform. My workflow with Hugo, Git and deploy works well. But handling photos is fiddly — I have to format images, upload them to the server, then embed them in Markdown. To actually manage five minutes every day, I decided on Writefreely, which I installed on my Uberspace.
About an hour later, after multiple failed attempts to access the installed version (something was wrong with the permissions), I switched back to Hugo. Since the rougher notes shouldn’t dominate the feed, I created a separate channel called “Sieben” (seven minutes). The notes would live there, somewhat hidden. I’d already published a “Five Minute Note” on the main blog to test the workflow. All complete rubbish. By the time I had everything as I wanted it, it was afternoon.
Then I scrapped everything and deleted it all.
Because I’d forgotten something fundamental.
I thought I wouldn’t fall for this again. But it happened. I followed a fixed idea and got completely scattered.
Freewriting is fine. But it’s something that stays with the author and should never see the world. A musician doesn’t put practice sessions on YouTube either.
Why did I want to publish daily anyway? Because it creates a certain baseline tension, forces me to make an effort every day. Not because I want to share something completely uninteresting with the world every day. That’s exactly why I’m not doing anything on social media and moving everything to the blog, including the Now page.
My lesson: I don’t need to publish every day. For whom anyway? But I want to write every day. When it feels finished enough, I’ll publish. Then I’ll adjust it if I find more to add or say. The piece doesn’t need to be finished in a single writing session. I put it online when I want to. Since nobody reads these notes anyway, there’s no need to pressure myself.
Yesterday wasn’t completely useless. I learned to stick to my path and not jump on every passing train. There is no “Seven”.
I want to use my Now page every Friday as a kind of sprint review. I’ll probably stick with weekly sprints, aiming to create at least one “increment” on this blog per week. Forget the Seven — nobody wants to read that much detail. Keep it unpublished in the journal.
This started life in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. The English version was AI-assisted. My German-trained eyes may have missed a few things along the way. She’ll be right.