Mission Creep

mission creep
I only popped out for some milk

It started when I noticed that I hadn’t backed up my blog for over a month. I don’t think you should trust to automatic backups on blogs. You should back them up whenever you post something that you really don’t want to lose. I used to back up every few days. I have had some bad experiences with unbacked up stuff, and heard even worse ones from other people. So why had I stopped. I applied the 5 whys technique and discovered that I just wasn’t happy with the way my blog looked.

So I set aside a morning to work on getting my blog back into shape. I wanted to give it a cleaner look. I wanted to make it a better user experience. I had decided that I was only interested in people who actually read it, so I wanted to put all the ‘call to action’ stuff at the bottom of the page so that anyone reading would have a clear run. And I wanted to get rid of the boring typeface. I am also really bored with the images from an old clipart CD I have been using since around 1998. I don’t know if many people today have even seen a CD of clipart.

The other thing I wanted to do was to sort out my social media so I can post straight to them without having to do a lot of clicking.

So all reasonable stuff and I set aside a morning to dive in and get it all sorted. Well the morning flew by. So I allocated an afternoon as well. Then I carried on into the evening. And in fact, I was still at it at about half past eleven.

I went to bed and dreamt of WordPress plugins and XML site maps.

Next morning – this morning actually – I started off just where I left off. Another 2 hours vanished as if into mist. By this time I was simply doing crazy stuff. Half an hour trying to find my old Stumbleupon password? I was surprised to find that Stumbleupon even existed any more at first, and now I was trying to reunite myself with a platform I had completely forgotten about.

This is classic mission creep. You set out to do something perfectly reasonable and justifiable. Buy some milk, fix the sink, invade somewhere in the Middle East. But before long you have acquired a whole set of related but much less important objectives. And the more time you pour into it the harder it is to get out again.

The most stupid bit of the whole thing is that social media is not a very good tool for me.   Long experience indicates that when I concentrate on making the content interesting and relevant I get more traffic.  Pimping it on Pinterest or trying to get a bit of rumble on Stumbleupon just doesn’t do very much.

I hope you enjoy the new look of the blog. I could have enjoyed creating it, but didn’t.

5 thoughts on “Mission Creep”

  1. I was going to say this morning with your earlier post how good your blog looks. But now LOL. It looks really lovely. One of my favourite places to hang out on the web. Well done. It will be even harder to leave now.

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