Don’t do it.

I know some of you were considering it.

Stop.

Don’t do it.

I know how it goes. I’ve seen it happen to lots of people. You see all these blogs that you like and you think to yourself, “Hey, I’ve got plenty of good ideas. Maybe I should start a blog.” It sounds like such a fun idea. And maybe you’ll even get a following. Maybe you’ll get lots of readers and find a way to make a little extra cash through ads. At very least, you’ll be able to get all these ideas down onto paper.

What happens next is the excitement of the platform. WordPress? Blogger? Maybe you could even build a site from scratch! How much could that cost? Well, okay, it’s an investment. But it’ll be worth it to have all that freedom. You’re going to want total control of your blog site for when it gets big.

You spend about one to five hours setting up the site. The number of hours is based on a complex calculation that factors in your interest level, your frustration tolerance, and how much time you are willing to spend making things line up precisely. You’ll throw in some dummy content, probably an About Me page. It will be vague. “This is my blog about my thoughts!” There is a 70% chance you will use the words “random” or “weird” or “fun” to affectionately describe yourself and your blog.

Your first post is a little boring, you can admit that. It’s only an introductory post. You just need to have something up. After it’s done you take a look at the site and decide to change the color scheme or the background or the widgets. This takes another hour. It doesn’t matter though, because you’re doing this on a Saturday when you have plenty of free time. It’s not like you’re coming home every night after work, setting up the site 20 minutes at a time. Of course not. You’re doing the whole thing in one day. It’s better this way. This way, you’ll have a good, solid foundation from which to work. If you spread it out, you’d never have time to get all these little things done. You’d never have time for the REAL blogging.

Depending on your confidence level, you will then tell either a small selection of very close friends, or the entirety of your internet sphere. Most likely the latter. The link to your blog will be all over your Facebook. It will be on your Twitter and maybe even in a mass email to your contact list. And you will get a lot of page views, because a lot of people you know will be interested. And it will feel pretty great.

And then Sunday comes. Sunday is kind of a lazy day anyway. You never get much of anything done on a Sunday. Besides, most blogs don’t post new content every day. You just put up your intro post yesterday. You’ll post something tomorrow. Yeah, that’ll work. You can make it into an every-other-day sorta thing.

This decision will be the last active thing you ever do with your blog. Your blog will sit in the vast internet wasteland of mostly-finished but never-started websites. A few of your friends will have bookmarked it, and they will check back several times over the next week to see the new posts. But there will be none. Within four months you will have forgotten your login information, which you didn’t write down.

R.I.P. little blog.

You may be thinking that it wouldn’t happen to you. You may be thinking that if you decided to blog, you would have more dedication. You would be able to stick with it. At very least you know you’d be able to go more than a couple of days.

But thoses are Saturday thoughts. And no matter how good your Saturday thoughts are, Monday always happens. You go to work at your normal, every day job. You come home in the evening, and you get something to eat. You’re about to sit down to write your next post when you remember some important task that has been left undone. Maybe you promised a friend you would do something by Monday. Maybe the trash is supposed to go out Monday night, or you promised to do the dishes. These are all very legitimate and very important things. And by the time you are done with the legitimate and important parts of your life, it’s late. You’re tired. It’s time to go to bed. You don’t feel like writing now anyway, it’s best to wait until morning.

The same thing happens the next night, and the one after that. Occasionally you sit down in an attempt to write, but it’s hard to think of anything. You can’t remember any of those ideas that used to spin around in your head. You do a lot of staring at blank screens. A lot of writing bad opening sentences and then deleting them so you can write something worse. Once or twice you manage to finish something, but once you go back to read it you realize it’s dreadful and not worth publishing.

So don’t start a blog. You will feel bad about it constantly, every time you’re late with a post or forced to put up content you’re not happy with just to keep a schedule. Don’t start a blog. You’ll have to work on it every day, and you won’t want to. It isn’t fun. Don’t start a blog.

Only fools start blogs.