The obligations we create for ourselves

Not many of my non-blogging friends (which comprises the entirety of friend-base, save for one person who I never talk to outside of social networking sites) quite get the whole blogging thing. The idea that I have set out a schedule for myself (three posts a week, Monday/Wednesday/Friday, six a.m.) that I do my damnedest to stick to seems to boggle them, for they can't see how these obligations I have set out for myself could be so worth sticking to. It's quite similar to WoW, actually, in that many non-players probably view the obligations raiders have to their raid groups in a similar way. Those doubtful onlookers probably wonder why we take our obligations so seriously when they are involving something that is, after all, just a game. (Yeah, about that...) But since that isn't the topic I want to discuss today, I'll summarize my thoughts on raid obligations by saying that no matter what it is concerning, a promise made to someone else is a promise, and breaking that promise is no less significant because the promise concerned a game, be it a digital game or otherwise.

But back on the topic of bloging, just like raiding, sometimes we can burn ourselves out while blogging, and we may feel the need to take a break. A certain favorite blogger of mine had to do just that recently, and when she came back from her break, she announced she'd probably be limiting her posting to once a week. This is quite a big shift for a blog that had previously posted four to five times a week, but considering that her posts often rival/exceed my posts in length, I can't say I'm surprised. I personally limited myself to three times a week because I knew I'd need that time, and more than a year later, it's a choice I'm glad I made. But it made me think: the posting habits we have set up what our readers expect from our blog, turning fulfilling those expectations into a sort of obligation. What I wondered was, is it ok to go back on that obligation? Is it acceptable to reduce the frequency with which we post when our readers have come to expect us to post with a certain level of frequency?

It may seem like a silly question to ask. After all, if we have a legitimate reason for reducing our posting frequency (time constraints, blogging cutting into other areas of ones life, a desire to get back into old hobbies, etc.), shouldn't it be a no-brainer that balance comes first? I wish it were easy to say yes, but I often find that behind their attractive wording, questions like that are often based on the assumption that blogging (or whatever the hobby in question is) should always take a backseat to our other obligations. I know this doesn't apply to everyone, but considering the parallels between blogging about WoW and playing it, imagine if you told someone you were spending too much time playing WoW and wanted to cut back a bit. While they might encourage you for doing so in the name of balance in your life, they would probably really be encouraging you do so because they think that WoW should never take precedent over any other activity (let us not forget the stigma that still surrounds MMOs).

Perhaps the best place to look for a precedent on this kind of issue is the raiding scene, which, as I mentioned, has quite a few parallels with the blogging scene. In the raiding communities I've been in and the ones I know about second-hand from my raiding friends, taking a break from the game can bring about a mixed bag of emotions. In the more friendly guilds I've been in or known about, people are happy for those who want to take a break, since it shows that those people know they need to reevaluate their priorities. In the more cutting edge guilds I've heard about, though, someone taking a break can be a bit more of an issue. In those guilds, raiders are harder to replace due to the higher standards those guilds hold their members to, so when a guild member takes a break, I often sense a bit of hostility or resentment in conversation about him. I often get the idea that his fellow raiders feel abandoned because of his absence. So in short, it seems that how acceptable it is to take a break from WoW or to reduce one's frequency of play all depends on the company one keeps in-game

How can we apply this to blogging? I suppose the best way to answer the question of whether it's acceptable to reduces one's frequency of blogging is to look at the readership one has garnered. If you garnered your readership based on your frequency of posting and little more, then by posting less frequently, you are reducing the biggest draw of your blog, taking what made your blog appealing away from those readers. In that case, it's understandable for them to stop reading. But if it's your insight, your interaction with your readers, or anything else that primarily draws readers to your blog, then as long as reducing the frequency of your posting won't take away from any of those draws, then I see no issue with it, for they probably won't, either. And in the end, only two entities matter in all things blogging: the blogger, and the readership, and if both are ok with the blogger posting less frequently, then there is no issue.