Published on November 3, 2025 8:00 AM GMT

Until yesterday, I believed that the only reason not to write blog posts was opportunity cost. “I could spend the next hour writing a blog post very quickly,” I would tell myself, “but then I can’t spend that hour on anything else.” It didn’t occur to me that writing a blog post under severe time constraints might have other costs.

To my consternation and delight, I have very rapidly discovered over the past two days that writing blog posts when you don't really have time to properly edit them, sit on them overnight, get feedback, etc., has many costs, and that these costs mostly don't matter, respectively.

The costs don't matter because (1) they are smaller than they might seem, (2) there are workarounds to decrease them, and (3) the benefits are larger.

Let's work through some examples.

Writing bad blog posts is bad for your reputation

Nobody wants a blog full of thousands of terrible posts with the occasional gem. That's why, for years, I've followed the strategy of only writing and publishing the gems, and skipping the terrible posts entirely. This way, readers of my blog don't have to hunt around for the good stuff.

...except...

1. Readers of my blog have a tendency to disagree with me about which posts are terrible and which are gems; my self-indulgent detective hunt for a Unicode encoding error has more LessWrong karma than my weird Socratic dialogue about base-pi numbers, for example. Also, people (hopefully) tend to skip over mediocre posts and share the good ones with their entire contact list (hint hint).
2. You can always take down the bad posts later if you still think they're net-negative, or hide them in a subdirectory of some sort, maybe called "30 First Drafts". (I don't know if this is self-referential because I haven't decided yet if I'm going to do this.)
3. Practice makes perfect! I think I heard that the clay pots story got traced back to its originator and he confessed to making it up from whole cloth, but it's definitely true that writing 30 blog posts in a month will make your 31st blog post better than it would've been otherwise.

Writing blog posts quickly is impossible

Let's say you decide you're going to write a blog post in the next hour. You start writing it. An hour later, you have covered about a third of the territory you wanted, gone down several rabbit holes, and edited none of it.

1. You can always change the title from "FTL Travel" to "FTL Travel and Scientific Realism"; your audience probably won't notice that the introduction to your post is pointing in a somewhat different direction from the conclusion.
2. That was a workaround, arguably, so maybe it should go here? Another workaround is that you can write your blog post linearly, start to finish, and refuse to change a single word after it's on the page (except to fix obvious typos). This makes the post worse, but the writing process a lot faster HAHA YES FIVE HUNDRED WORDS. You can also write your post directly into the text box on wordcounter.net for motivation.
3. Writing quickly is extremely valuable! In the time it would've taken you to write a blog post slowly, you can engage in other valuable pursuits, like sleeping and eating.

Motivation to write drops precipitously after the five hundredth word

Yup!

1. People don't really like reading long blog posts. Next time, you'll get the key points out sooner. And you probably still have a few things you know you want to say, which you're now extra motivated to say quickly.
2. Instead of writing linearly, you can write a quick outline, then progressively expand it until it's post-sized and sufficiently detailed to get the ideas across. Maybe I'll try that tomorrow.
3. Sometimes you need to finish writing something even though you're not feeling super motivated! That's also a skill that improves with practice, presumably hopefully.

Writing blog posts isn't as much fun as reading them

Maybe you had a vague mental image of sitting at your keyboard, channeling the pure stuff of thought into beautiful prose, and now you're finding out for the first time that there are intermediate steps where you have to push a bunch of keys in the correct order and then frown at them and push them in a slightly different order.

1. Honestly, it's still more fun than reading most blog posts? It requires more effort but that's a different thing.
2. You can write the whole post start-to-finish without changing or deleting anything. I already said this but seriously, it's worth trying. You can also make the post indulgently self-referential and silly, although you probably shouldn't do that every time.
3. The act of creation is life-affirming in a way that consumption and critique can only shallowly imitate.