I keep a document called Topics, which is essentially a long compilation of random statements, thoughts, phrases, and half-finished sentences that represent some larger idea that I have not yet found the time to write about.  I have even established redundancy to preserve this document, by keeping copies of it in no less than five different places both online and off, because that’s how important and valuable I consider the wildly assorted contents of this document to be.

On the rare occasion that I do have time to sit down and write, I sometimes feel as if I don’t have anything to write about at that particular moment.  I somehow seem to forget that I have oh, just about a hundred things waiting to written about in my Topics document.

I pondered why this happens; why I often fail to finish fleshing something out in writing, when it’s already a fully-formed opinion that I am holding in my head.  After some thinking, I realized that I would probably do a lot more writing for my blog if I did a lot less talking over instant message.

Penelope Trunk has argued about why you should write a blog not a book if your goal is to make an impact with your ideas, because you can get more feedback in a faster and more timely fashion.

Well, with instant messaging, I find this to true as well. The responses are even more immediate than comments left on a blog. And furthermore, it’s not just the passive consumption of information, but rather, the active engagement in a conversation.  Finally, since the interaction is taking place directly between just two people, it’s a great way to hone the angle of a story or gauge possible reactions. Almost like having a very focused focus group.

However, the result of communicating in this informal and impermanent manner is not nearly as valuable as investing the energy in writing a blog post instead. In the end, you’re still only communicating one-on-one, instead of one-to-many.

When I look back to the points in time when I blogged most prolifically, my hypothesis about the negative impact of instant messaging on my writing output seems to make a lot of sense.

When I wrote the most and the most often, I was living in China.  Being that it’s on the opposite side of the world, the time difference meant that when it was noon there, it was midnight here.  In other words, there was rarely anybody online to chat with at the times that I could be online, so I was forced to transcribe my thoughts into a more tangible form, where it could be sent off to be absorbed at another person’s convenience.

Through these observations, I realized that if I would make a more concerted effort to resist the gravitation of instant gratification, I’d become a much more active blogger again.  And best of all, I’d once again begin to benefit from sharing my thoughts by way of one-to-many, instead of only one-to-one.