Categories
General Personal Development

Don’t Blog Angry

Don’t Publish Blog Entries When You Are Really Angry documents the frustration Juuso recently had with software. It’s never a good situation to be in when your computer shuts down suddenly only to tell you that it seems to have misplaced your email.

I don’t know if it’s Microsoft’s fault or Mozilla’s fault (or my fault), but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is how the heck I’m going to find those emails again. I have backups, but they are few days old.

Lessons are: backup your emails, and and don’t write your blog when you are angry. I think I managed the second part quite well, it’s the first part I need to practise more.

I picked up a different lesson from his post.

Recently I got upset about unanticipated obstacles to game development I recently experienced and wrote a blog post about it. I railed against inconsiderate SUV drivers and my problems with finding parking after a snow storm.

But did I write about any lessons I learned from the experience? Is it useful to anyone other than as a slightly amusing story about one man’s struggle against the elements and latte-drinking, cell phone-using, yuppie tank commanders?

No, I just wrote while I was angry. It wasn’t very fruitful at all. Calling them yuppie tank commanders wasn’t called for either. Maybe I felt better immediately after clicking the Publish button in WordPress, but how would it help anyone else reading it? How does it help me when I read through the archives?

Why have a blog if I’m just going to post knee-jerk reactions as if I was a newbie on a web forum? I can do better.

In the original post, what I should have been writing about was the futility of complaining about circumstances and situations outside of your control. I lost an extra 15 minutes of development time due to outside circumstances delaying my ability to get home sooner? So what? The really interesting questions: what was I going to do to gain it back? What will I need to do differently in the coming days to prevent a loss of what precious little productivity I have? Those lines of thought are what you should have read.

The real lesson is that things will happen that are outside of your control, but you, as a human being, have the ability to THINK before you act. You can also anticipate that things can and will go wrong, and you can take action to mitigate those problems. Create a backup system and use it. Create a policy of only publishing your blog posts the next day and follow it. Make your plans revolve around the FACT that it will take longer to get where you have to go due to the weather.

But no matter what, don’t blog angry. You’ll be more coherent, relevant, and useful if you write with a cool head.

3 replies on “Don’t Blog Angry”

Comments are closed.