T w e n t y S i d e d

I mentioned that I released a new version of Useless Stats a few days ago. The most interesting thing I learned from the program was this:

I might have guessed (for reasons I outline below) that the bars started at a high point on Monday and diminished as the week went on. Barring that, I would have expected that the Monday to Friday bars would be more or less even (or at least irregular). I never would have predicted that my posting patterns made such a nice curve.

I wasn’t aware that I did more writing mid-week. I was aware that I didn’t post as much on the weekends as I did during the week, but I didn’t expect my weekend post count to be quite that much lower. I wonder if this curve is very common?

The odd thing is that I do a lot of writing on the weekends. I will take whatever ideas have been bouncing around in my head and turn them into stub posts to be filled in later. Sometimes these posts are just brief reminders, but sometimes they are blocks of text that need to be organized and edited. When a weekday rolls around, I look in my storehouse of ideas and see if there is anything I want to finish, or anything I want to talk about. This is where nearly all of my longer, essay-type posts come from. Not all of my ideas make the cut. Sometimes a post will languish in the idea bin for a while. If I see one that’s been sitting around for weeks but never got published, I usually decide it must not be that interesting and delete it outright.

So as I go into Monday I have lots of stub posts from which to choose. Come Friday they are mostly depleted. I can only assume that my shorter, more spontaneous posts are the onces that form the curve. I wonder why I’m so much more prolific mid-week?

And just now it occurs to me: My short posts are usually done in response to a post someone else has made. As I visit other blogs, I see people talking about stuff and when something catches my eye I weigh in. So, perhaps lots of people post more in mid-week, which gives me more to talk about then. What I’m driving at is that perhaps the curve is the result of everyone else’s habits, and not really my own.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.