Assumed audience: Anyone else who sometimes struggles with where to put their time (especially in the current travails).
Epistemic status: Pretty darn comfortable with this decision and indeed with the decision-making mode that produced it.
In April and May, inspired by Reda Lemeden, I experimented with posting a weekly summary of the things I’d read that week, under the heading This Week I Learned. In practice it was less “This week I learned” and more “This week I read,” but that was fine. Pretty quickly, though, I ran into the same basic issue that led me to stop publishing my newsletter: time.
This is a slightly ridiculous (but very typical for me) case of a self-created problem and a self-imposed stricture, but I wanted to actually summarize everything I’d read and thought valuable to my readers (or my future self). It turns out that doing that takes a lot of time. (Who knew?) The work of writing it up each week was taking me an hour or more. And after about a month or so, I decided I needed to spend that time on other things. So, while I really enjoyed the experiment, I bid it adieu.
Perhaps at some much less busy and much less stressful point in the future I’ll pick it up again — or perhaps not. One of the great and lasting joys of a blog like this one is that it need only ever be exactly what I want of it at any given time!