A Hierarchy of Blogging

As I mentioned the other day I’ve been a little slack in my blogging recently.

I started having a bit of a think about my blogging behaviour to see if I could make sense of this most recent lull. I’m sure the self-analysis was partially brought on as an aftermath of Mental Detox Week. And because I’d just come back from holiday which was another screen-free period.

When I got back from holiday I dropped into a week of extremely tough work. Probably one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in the last couple of years. Plus Balloonacy was running a the time. Which didn’t leave any free time for blogging. It didn’t even give me enough time to get properly on top of my email leftovers from holiday week. And my to-do list started to run to a seemingly unmanageable length.

So I decided to set myself into max-efficiency mode. It took all my working time (and a bit extra) to get back to zero-inbox and a to-do list full of non-overdue items. Which I did. It took me a few days of hard graft. But it was worth it.

One of these days I’ll share my productivity setup with everyone – in the last couple of months I’ve finally found my own cut-down GTD style setup that really works for me – especially if I never go on holiday ;-)

Anyway once I’d caught up with emails and to-dos I figured that I ought to keep my life in order and have some fun before I got stuck into WordPress. So I went to Glastonbury. Which resulted in more emails to deal with, more to-dos and even less blogging.

At this point I started to think about some kind of ‘life hierarchy’ that perhaps I was unwittingly starting to adhere to. And of course there’s only one place to look when you’re thinking about hierarchies and life. Good old Abe Maslow.

Here’s his pyramid (re-created from this Wikipedia entry).

When I saw it, I realised that I could kind of apply my own version of a hierarchy to it. One that distills my new-found blog-life balance. Enter Tait’s Hierarchy of Blogging…

I realised that my previous blogging behaviour had seen me jumping around all over the pyramid. Sometimes blogging (or at least twittering) when excreting. Occasionally blogging instead of getting the things done that pay my wages. And quite often blogging as a kind of proxy for a social life. Even going as far as being involved with setting up a blog (with a team of co-editors) dedicated to sexual prowess as promised by junk-emailers – lord knows I hope that’s not some neo-Freudian replacement for the last thing on Maslow’s third layer!

Anyway I’m not promising that I won’t start jumping randomly between the layers of the stack again. But for my own mental-well-being (and I think quality of blog posting), I’m going to try and sort out my lower-order needs before I start posting drivel.

I think I might have just fallen at the first hurdle.

And besides blogging can be good for helping out with sorting out some of the lower order stuff too. I’m sure it can. Can’t it…?