The drawbacks of scheduling posts

Scheduling posts to my blog has a few drawbacks but I think the most annoying one is that the topics I write about could be out-of-date pretty quickly or the topic could be covered by someone else.

I have a personal publishing goal to publish an image and blog post per weekday. Sometimes I go for long stretches making that goal and other times I go stretches without. To do so I schedule a bunch of posts in advance.

I wrote about this process in October of 2016 when I wrote a custom WordPress plugin to make it easier (for me) to schedule image posts.

I don’t just schedule image posts but also links, regular posts, and audio bits. For example, I’m writing this post on Tuesday and I’m going to schedule it to be posted on Thursday (the next available slot that I have open in my personal publishing calendar). This particular post contains nothing that needs to be published on a specific day so it doesn’t matter when I decide to publish it. However, earlier today (Tuesday) I wrote a quick post regarding JSON Feed, a topic I’ve been writing about a bit lately, and scheduled it for tomorrow morning. Then, not a few hours later, I noticed the same topic written about by someone else and mainly covered my point. So now I’m faced with allowing that post to publish as is, editing it, or deleting it.

Or, maybe I shouldn’t care at all?

This is one of those posts that I’m glad I wrote because by the time I distilled my thoughts on the matter, edited this post, and re-edited it, I’ve come to a conclusion. Starting June 1 (today) I’m going to continue scheduling posts that do not contain any timely subject matter (like image posts) and set aside some time each morning to write posts for the day. So I’ll be switching my strategy from publishing each day to writing each day. It should be fun.