The algorithm Gods and keeping a promise to myself

I was feeling embarrassed and frustrated that I didn’t have something new to post today. I normally have my Sunday posts prepared before, you know, Sunday.

“I don’t have something new to post today,” I griped to my husband and my younger sister, who was in town this weekend, visiting from New York City. “I guess I have to email my people that I don’t have a new post.”

“You don’t even have to email,” they said. “It’s totally fine. Just post again when you can.”

“No, I still have to,” I countered. “It’s not that I think people are out there, on edge, waiting for my email to come in. It’s just about my own accountability to myself. You know?”

I joined a new project at work this month, and I went from working 32 hours a week over the last months to working about 50 hours a week this month. The new project is busy and very understaffed, so my work has quickly taken over days, nights, and weekends. The dedicated writing time I had before disappeared, and I have yet to figure out a new system for when in the week I will carve out time to write. Hence having no post lined up for today.

Now I know that you, dear reader, don’t mind, and would not fault me for missing a Sunday here or there.

But the reason I’m so determined to be consistent (and I’ve mostly succeeded since I started this project!) is that I made a promise to myself to post something new every Sunday.

I care a lot about that promise to myself – and I’ll tell you why.

I told other people about that promise just for the extra dose of accountability.

But I really feel that this is between me and me.

I also publish my writing on Medium.com and am an active member of that community as a reader and writer. I’ve read what feels like hundreds, but is probably only 10, articles on Medium about how you must post every day or even multiple times per day in order to please the algorithm gods. Apparently you have to do this, or else the algorithm gods will forget about/never notice you.

I’ll admit I’ve occasionally felt pressure to change my Sunday system and post multiple times per week even if that meant doing different content or shorter posts. I really felt after reading those articles that I, too, needed to place my sacrifices on the altar of the algorithm gods.

I’m glad that I kept doing my own thing. (Although, it’s true the algorithm gods have never noticed me. Yet.)

I just read yet another Medium article explaining how you can succeed on Medium in four easy steps and earn your desired monthly income. (Side note: You can earn money on Medium for your articles, depending how many people read your work and how much the algorithm gods love you. Because I am succeeding very modestly on both counts, I’ve earned a grand total of $1.90 on Medium in the past two months. If I were doing this for the money, I would be churning out a lot more articles on very different topics! Side side note, not everyone apparently loves reading sometimes-gruesome tales about civil wars/refugee camps.)

I digress. The author of the article wrote about her year of experimenting with different approaches to publishing on Medium and seeing what worked best in terms of readers and, accordingly, income.

“To sum it up, here is what I plan to keep doing in 2023,” she writes. “It’s only 4 easy steps, so it’s very manageable! Number one: Publish 30–35 stories per month.”

Okay, she’s already lost me.

Publishing 30-35 stories per month is not something I personally find to be “very manageable.”

So according to the Medium people, you need to post post post post post. According to what my schedule looks like these days, I need to never post a new piece of writing again.

I’m aiming for neither of those.

I just want to stick to my commitment to hitting “publish” once every Sunday.

I don’t want to succumb to the peer pressure over on Medium and start posting all the time (nor would I be happy with the quality of my writing if I increased the quantity that way); I also don’t want to get out of the habit of my weekly posting routine.

It all comes back to the promise I made myself.

About a year ago, I decided to create GeorgieNink.com as a home for my writing: both new pieces and pieces I’d written over the years while living in Jordan. Creating this, and promising (to myself) to post once per week, was the equivalent of saying to myself, “This is really important to me and I want to stick with it through thick and thin.”

I follow an inner voice, an intuition, when I write and edit and publish. I am following a creative vision that is all my own.

I have received both positive and negative feedback; the compliments and encouragements I hugely appreciate, and the critiques I usually disregard (though some were good, and I took them into consideration. One trusted fellow writer on Medium told me, “Your titles are extremely vague and no one can tell what you are writing about. Make your titles concise and clear, so people know what they’ll be reading about when they click on your story.” Great point. I tried to take his advice and improve my titles but it’s honestly something I struggle with!)

So when I was wringing my hands over having nothing new to post this week, and my husband and sister were telling me don’t worry about it, I appreciated them, but I still worried about it. Not because of any external reason, but because of how I wanted to commit to my writing through thick and thin.

It’s like I said to my writing, “I believe in you, and I want to try to be brave and put you out there on the huge scary internet.”

In order for that to work, I have to be consistent about it.

If I’d said to my writing, “I’ll put you out there when I get around to it / when work is less busy / when I feel you are perfect / when I get over my own insecurities about you / when I have a book deal,” then I would never do it.

I’m proud that, over the last months, I’ve published my writing despite that work was busy, I did not feel it was perfect, I had insecurities about it, I didn’t have a book deal. That’s the point. I did it anyway.

There will always be something in life. Right now it’s working 50-hour weeks, planning my wedding, and feeling extremely stretched thin. In a few years, it could be caring for a tiny human. Or who knows, maybe my ex-friend, anxiety, will come back to visit me and try to scare me away from writing for a while.

There will always be something. But I refuse to be scared off. I have this spark of something that I believe in deeply, and I want to keep following it. That’s how I feel – that I’m following something. I don’t necessarily feel like the captain of my own writing ship. It seems more like I’m following the inner voice wherever it leads me.

I’m curious to see where it will take me next.

See you back here next Sunday.

(And thank you, as always, for reading my work. It means a LOT to me!)