When I recently started a new newsletter, Three Thought Starters, I originally intended to send an email out every Sunday. I was very excited, because I’d been planning to put a newsletter out for months.

Things were coming along nicely, and my subscribers received the first few issues very positively.

After a few weeks, I slammed into a hard realization: I don’t have the bandwidth for this. The rest of my life was paying the price for me overextending myself. I even considered not writing at this blog every day. I experienced a lot of stress. So I stopped the newsletter. I missed one week, then two. 

All sorts of chatter came up, protesting this decision. Noise like, “If you want to take your writing career seriously, you need to write to your audience weekly!” Or, “It’s working, you should do more of it!” Or even mean things, like, “This inconsistency is why you’re not going to be great!”

I was still feeling badly about it when one of my friends asked if he could excerpt one of my thought starters to his newsletter. He asked me where he could link to, and I made a quick decision. Instead of “Every Sunday…” I edited the promise to say, “On the occasional Sunday…”

Almost immediately, I felt more at ease. The internal protests simmered down. My shoulders relaxed. There would be no pressure for me to build up a backlog of content, or anything like that. I could write it when I was able to, and no more than that.

I still am a very big believer in consistency—I am still trundling along with this blog every day—so long as it liberates my work, and doesn’t govern it. Moving forward though, I think it makes sense to keep a degree of unscheduled and flexible if I want to just try something new for fun. Looking back, I wonder if I would’ve started that newsletter sooner without deciding I needed to commit to it ahead of time.