I had a good reason.
Over the years I've occasionally fallen behind on finishing a column, but only
once was my delay longer than half a month. I've had good excuses, like being
on vacation, or having too many pressing tasks to attend to. As I've noted in
the past, maintaining the regularity of a monthly column helps me to pace myself
with other tasks as well, and it serves as a sort of cognitive spring cleaning,
a way of getting excess baggage out of the way so that I can start thinking about
other, newer, items. Because of this, if I can avoid it, I prefer not to fall behind.
My longest delay was between January and April of 2000, during which I put the
Boidem on a back burner while I plunged into my thesis.
I'd gotten back on pace even before formal submission, but those were months when,
though I'd made notes to myself, and even outlined my columns, the Boidem itself
became the excess baggage to a task that had to be completed by June. And yet,
after submitting my thesis I preferred to pick up where I'd left off and actually
post columns for the missing months. With a blog I wouldn't feel compelled to
do that. Then again, blogs are considerably less forgiving about misrepresenting
actual dates of postings.
Go to: In one tenth the time