My 2022 in LJ
I'm a big fan of analyzing parts of my life to see how they're going, particularly around the start of a new year. LiveJournal is still the biggest part of my online life, so here we go.
In 2022, I made 232 different posts. Assuming my manual counts I put together in my 2021 LJ review are accurate, that is the most single posts I have made in one year by a substantial margin. My top 5 now looks like this:
2022 - 232
2021 - 210
2004 - 204
2020 - 151
2014 - 145
This number was driven by the start of the year, when I managed to do one post a day from January 1 through June 24. That's 175 consecutive days. Because that streak actually started in 2020 the total consecutive days posted was 300, which was five times longer than my previous personal high of 59 days.
I have mixed feelings on that streak looking back at it. On the plus side, I forced myself to write about many topics that had been in my backlog for years, and most of those posts don't seem forced or subpar when I go back to read them. Major series that I knocked out during the 2022 portion of the streak include:
- The final 37 posts in my PKT25 series.
- I finished a retroactive cinema year in review for basically my whole life.
- My 11 posts about having visited Canadian provinces
- 16 reposts of my work blog
- The start of the My Life in Books series, which has many, many authors queued up to be written. Also, one of those posts was inexplicably popular on LJ.
The streak also very unexpectedly boosted my ranking on this site to around 275. I only found out about this accidentally, and I plummeted dramatically after it ended (currently well past 10,000), which makes sense given how few people I presume actually read this. No loss, but it was kind of amusing.
The major downside of the streak was that it ate up a ton of time, most of which came straight out of my reading. I think this is a classic case of "I'm glad I did it, but I probably won't do it again." Or at least not while I'm employed full-time!
The streak wasn't the whole story though. The flip side is that I only made 57 more posts in the following six months after the streak ended, so it was essentially feast or famine in 2022. From July onward, only December had me posting more than half the days of the month, and of course, I also set a record for my longest streak without posting when I went forty days sans post while on sabbatical. After my return, my sabbatical gave me sufficient material to knock out a 16 post diary of my sabbatical to New Mexico which comprised a big chunk of my writing from October onward.
The famine has sort of continued, as this is my first post since December 26, for a nifty 28 day streak without posting, my 3rd longest of all time. I'll talk more about why that happened in a future post, but it was a personal choice. I don't regret it, but I find that I do miss writing, so it's clear that I need to find some balance in the future.
That's the big takeaway from 2022. I really enjoy the writing/self-reflection/personal history that I do here, and I'm not stopping. I went a bit overboard in the first half of 2022 and didn't do as much as I'd like in the second half, so shooting for something like 2-3 posts a week seems like the optimal state for me right now.
By the way, I decided that I find this sort of summary useful to me, so I've created a new tag so I can find them more quickly in the future. I've gone back and added the tag where appropriate.
In 2022, I made 232 different posts. Assuming my manual counts I put together in my 2021 LJ review are accurate, that is the most single posts I have made in one year by a substantial margin. My top 5 now looks like this:
2022 - 232
2021 - 210
2004 - 204
2020 - 151
2014 - 145
This number was driven by the start of the year, when I managed to do one post a day from January 1 through June 24. That's 175 consecutive days. Because that streak actually started in 2020 the total consecutive days posted was 300, which was five times longer than my previous personal high of 59 days.
I have mixed feelings on that streak looking back at it. On the plus side, I forced myself to write about many topics that had been in my backlog for years, and most of those posts don't seem forced or subpar when I go back to read them. Major series that I knocked out during the 2022 portion of the streak include:
- The final 37 posts in my PKT25 series.
- I finished a retroactive cinema year in review for basically my whole life.
- My 11 posts about having visited Canadian provinces
- 16 reposts of my work blog
- The start of the My Life in Books series, which has many, many authors queued up to be written. Also, one of those posts was inexplicably popular on LJ.
The streak also very unexpectedly boosted my ranking on this site to around 275. I only found out about this accidentally, and I plummeted dramatically after it ended (currently well past 10,000), which makes sense given how few people I presume actually read this. No loss, but it was kind of amusing.
The major downside of the streak was that it ate up a ton of time, most of which came straight out of my reading. I think this is a classic case of "I'm glad I did it, but I probably won't do it again." Or at least not while I'm employed full-time!
The streak wasn't the whole story though. The flip side is that I only made 57 more posts in the following six months after the streak ended, so it was essentially feast or famine in 2022. From July onward, only December had me posting more than half the days of the month, and of course, I also set a record for my longest streak without posting when I went forty days sans post while on sabbatical. After my return, my sabbatical gave me sufficient material to knock out a 16 post diary of my sabbatical to New Mexico which comprised a big chunk of my writing from October onward.
The famine has sort of continued, as this is my first post since December 26, for a nifty 28 day streak without posting, my 3rd longest of all time. I'll talk more about why that happened in a future post, but it was a personal choice. I don't regret it, but I find that I do miss writing, so it's clear that I need to find some balance in the future.
That's the big takeaway from 2022. I really enjoy the writing/self-reflection/personal history that I do here, and I'm not stopping. I went a bit overboard in the first half of 2022 and didn't do as much as I'd like in the second half, so shooting for something like 2-3 posts a week seems like the optimal state for me right now.
By the way, I decided that I find this sort of summary useful to me, so I've created a new tag so I can find them more quickly in the future. I've gone back and added the tag where appropriate.