Adventure Rules Quick Update: Know Your Limits

Hey, adventurers! Happy Hump Day! I hope you’re enjoying your week and that, if you are a fellow ARMS owner, you’re getting the opportunity today to punch some folks as Max Brass.

Me, I’m on vacation this week, but that hasn’t really made me less busy. I spent the weekend with my family before heading back home to pick up my wife from the airport. She spent her weekend at RTX (for those who, like me, wouldn’t have had any idea what that is, it’s the annual convention for the gaming community Rooster Teeth). She had fun and came home with some cool stuff, including a new expansion pack for Boss Monster that I intended to preview yesterday, but that simply didn’t work out. I had to do some serious house cleaning before getting my wife from the airport, and after that we went with some of our friends to see Spiderman: Homecoming. Once I got home, we watched the first episode of season 3 of The Ranch on Netflix before calling it a night.

It wasn’t until almost midnight that I realized I hadn’t written a Tabletop Tuesday yet. I woke up Tuesday morning with every intent of trying to get it done, but the pressure to type it out in such a rush really just made me uncomfortable and I didn’t feel up to creating the post. So for those who enjoy Tabletop Tuesday and were looking forward to seeing something yesterday, I apologize.

One of my blog goals here is consistency, and that’s something that I have been delivering on less in the past couple of weeks. Part of it is just summer busyness – illness in the family, my wife’s trip out of town, work-related tasks, my son’s birthday, Vacation Bible School, and two different weddings have all made my summer a bit crowded. Perhaps because of all that, or perhaps just because there’s not enough time in the day, the four posts a week schedule has not been working.

The past couple of weeks I have been shooting for a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday schedule. It’s a bit tough. Having two sets of back-to-back posts during the week has made it to where I feel burnt-out after a couple of days. I really should use my off-days to get ahead on articles, but at that point I just want to play one of the video games I’ve been neglecting and I don’t touch my keyboard. Which causes me to have to write posts at the last second, which causes me to fall further behind and need to write more, which causes me to want another break – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and this cycle is going to continue until something changes.

Because of that, I am determining that right now the four post a week schedule is too much of a push at this current time on the blog. I stated in my update at the beginning of the month that my goal is to find the point where I can achieve maximum quantity of posts without sacrificing their quality. At least at this point in my life, that number seems to be 3. The Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule was working really well for me and though I still want to push myself to grow the blog and better myself as a writer, at this point in my journey I think the bettering that needs to happen is something other than posting more often.

So what does that mean in the grand scheme of things? Beginning immediately, I’m returning to the three times a week schedule – I posted Monday, this update is going up on Wednesday, and I’ll have something for Friday. No Thursday post this week. I still intend to do the Boss Monster card preview as my other article this week – although Tabletop Tuesday will yet again disappear from the Tuesday time slot, I still want to push myself to grow that audience of the blog. So while it won’t necessarily be a specific day every week, I do want to post one tabletop article each week. I may end up choosing a specific day for those posts, and if that happens I can state with confidence that it would be Wednesday. But for now, I’d like to be a little more flexible about which of the three days a tabletop post can  fall upon. I want my tabletop posts to be organic as often as possible, and potentially having a little extra time to figure out what I want to write about could help with that.

If you were enjoying four posts per week, I’m sorry that I’m not realistically able to keep that up right now. I do want to keep that as a goal for 2017, but I think in order for me to do it successfully, I need to refine my writing process somewhat. Writing a single article often takes me way too long, and I feel like my pieces are wordy and unfocused sometimes. So my next step will likely be improving my process, with the goal of creating writing habits that help me get the same amount of work done in less time. At that point things should have also calmed down in my personal life – I can say with confidence that nothing is going to slow down until the end of July, but after that I might have a little less stress and a little more time to really give the blog more focus.

Thanks for reading this and thank you, adventurers, for sticking around through my antics over the summer. For my own sake as well as yours, I want to make sure that the work I am doing here is of a particular quality. My hope is that sticking to the 3-per-week schedule will allow me to give quality writing the attention it needs, and that I can grow my posting frequency once my process is more refined. Remember to come back Friday to check out some cards from Boss Monster: Implements of Destruction, and then return next week for more video game shenanigans!