The Times They Are A-Changin’

It’s been about eleven years since I started writing my blog.

I began back in 2013 when I moved to university, as I wanted an online space to show that I was more than just the list of experiences on my CV. I wanted future employers to know that I do other things with my spare time, that I have other hobbies: travelling, cooking, photography, writing, baking, knitting, and so much more.

I started off with the goal of writing one blog post per day, a pretty ludicrous proposition in retrospect. For a while I managed to keep this up, posting a couple of photos with a bit of hastily written text and calling it a day.

Naturally I couldn’t keep this up forever, so in the end I resorted to one per week. Over time, this steadfast rule loosened, and I began writing posts as and when I had something interesting to report back on: sometimes more than once a week, sometimes less.

This has been the format that I’ve stuck with for the past ten years or so, with very little changing. In that time, I introduced the ability to search my posts by destinations and begun peppering my daily updates with the odd more reflective piece and even a bit of prose, but the general idea has remained largely the same.

One thing that has changed has been the amount of detail I put into each post. What were once a few photos with a bit of explanatory text have turned into detailed accounts of my adventures with more carefully selected and edited imagery. I also began posting everything in Spanish too. These changes mean that each blog post now takes me longer than ever to write, translate, and publish.

In short, the blog now takes up a lot of my time.

Recently, I’ve been trying to spend more of this time doing other things. I’m getting into the swing of things at the gym, I’m really enjoying swimming, and I’m making more time to enjoy the simple things like cooking and reading and spending time with friends. I’ve also got a few little side projects on the go which I’m very excited about, but more on those when they’re ready to go.

As you can imagine, I can’t fit everything in all at once. Something has to give.

That’s where my blog comes in. I can’t keep up the scope and detail that I’ve tried to in the past, and so I’m reevaluating the format and frequency with which I post updates on here. This will mean that I post less often, but it will also hopefully mean that I will post better content.

My idea going forward is to not get so bogged down in the finer details of what I’ve been up to, but rather switch to a more entertaining overview of the best (and the worst) moments from my daily life, travels, and shenanigans – of which there will be even more this year!

I do love taking photos and I do love writing, so there’s no risk of my blog disappearing any time soon. I just need to rethink the format a little bit so that I’m not constantly conscious of having a lot of photos to post and things to write about. I want to enjoy writing on here, not be fretting over a growing list of pending posts.

So the times, they are a-changin’, but they’re not changing all that much.