There is one rule: write a blog post in under an hour.

I often tell people that they should blog. If they’re an expert on a topic, write about that. If they’re learning about a topic, write about first impressions and relationships to other things that they understand. People love a good “rise to competence” story. Maybe you provide something valuable to someone. Maybe you demonstrate competence to potential employers or partners. Maybe you make contact with interest groups that you didn’t realize existed. Maybe all that comes of it is improved writing skills.

Unfortunately, I’m not good at taking my advice.

I came up with the idea of the one-hour blog to get more thoughts recorded and published. I mull over all kinds of topics and write a lot, but when it comes to publishing I rarely feel like the topic is fully covered, the writing clear enough, or points are accurate enough.

The idea first struck me a few months ago when I thought that time-bounding my blogging might force me to produce more content. Unfortunately I haven’t dedicated myself to this approach, so it hasn’t helped much yet.

The approach is fairly straight-forward. Write non-stop on a topic for 45 minutes. Spend 15 minutes cleaning and organizing. Let it fly.

One problem I’ve run into when applying this idea is that I believe most topics deserve more attention than might be implied by the “1-hr-blog” tag. I keep a topic list on hand, so I’ll probably begin tagging some as “1-hr-blog” possibilities.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly” is a quote I hear floating around, and I agree with the sentiment. Improvement doesn’t happen without practice and, more importantly, criticism. The perfect blog entry may be possible, but I may spend so much time trying to achieve it that the end result isn’t worth the time. Better to shrink the feedback loop.

Where “1-hr-blog” fails: anything that requires research or data collection. I can really only touch on topics with which I’m very familiar or just giving some quick impressions. Side note: posts that explain how to do something or present data that I collected myself perform much better than most, with good reason. Unique value gets unique attention.

My goal is to make 2018 the year of the one-hour blog. An hour a month isn’t too much time to set aside, and if I stick to it, I may find a way to really make it work.

You can probably look forward to more writing on hobbies and projects since I can provide more useful and/or interesting information off the top of my head. The topic list is already growing.