Aaron Ausland is worried that blogging is using up his creativity. He raises some legitimate concerns about time and trade-offs, but with regards to creativity I actually think the complete opposite - that blogging increases my creativity.
On which I quote Felix Salmon's advice to Jonah Lehrer:
Firstly, think of it as reading, rather than writing. Lehrer is a wide-ranging polymath: he is sent, and stumbles across, all manner of interesting things every day. Right now, I suspect, he files those things away somewhere and wonders whether one day he might be able to use them for another Big Idea piece. Make the blog the place where you file them away. Those posts can be much shorter than the things Lehrer’s writing right now: basically, just an excited “hey look at this”, with maybe a short description of why it’s interesting. It’s OK if the meat of what you’re blogging is elsewhere, rather than on your own blog. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point.
blogging is not at heart about delivering new information, so much as it is about finding and linking and connecting and conversing.But do just make sure that you add some fucking value.
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Also: for me blogging feels about 90% system 1, so it isn't really competing with real effortful work in terms of mental energy.
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