Daily or Bulky?

I am currently subscribed to an email newsletter for “creative chaotics”. Although I am not very creative, and I would not consider myself as too chaotic, either. But I am interested in what type of advice this special audience is exchanging.

For many months now it had been promised that there would be a blog in addition to the email newsletter. But obviously this was postponed again and again. After a while, I was thinking whether is was just procrastinated (due to the supposed style of the author) of if there might be a deeper reason behind the choice between

• a frequent publication of single microcontent,items
• or at long intervals, a large collection of such small postings.

Is the latter perhaps more comfortable for this special audience? Such an infrequent newsletter, like a regular newspaper column, is basically comparable with a blog in that both cover the same quadrant of the Eisenhower matrix: content that is important but not urgent.

But the processing mode is very different. While the blog is written and read as a regular habit, such a newsletter is an impressing bulky piece that may have more appeal to people who love to think big? Perhaps they prefer such occasional occupation over daily habits. (Then the countless exhortations for procrastinators to make something a daily habit, would be worthless - just like the tip to break large impressive projects down to small steps?)

Prompted by Jenny’s amazement about daily completions, I thought about my own relationship with regular habits, and realized that I am also uncomfortable with too regular obligations, and I would hate to compulsorily blog at certain intervals. But I hate it even more to work through a long linear newsletter. And therefore, I also dislike the notion of the “news river” for blog reading using a web or email based aggregator (and stick to my dedicated desktop RSS reader). I want to pick my reading in a self-selected sequence.

People are very different, and therefore blog reading is not everybody’s preference.

15 December 2008 | Cognitive Styles | Comments