I'm back (after a 2.5 year long hiatus)

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This is the first blog post since the summer of 2022. The previous blog post described the overland journey (train, bus) to the The 8th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S). I have since attended the The 9th ICT4S conference (beginning of June 2023 in Rennes, France) and I was co-chair of the 10th ICT4S conference in Stockholm together with my colleague Elina Eriksson (end of June 2024).

Much else has happened since of which the single most important thing to mention here is that we (again me and Elina) are responsible for a new masters programme in Sustainable Digitalisation that started this academic year (e.g. in Aug/Sept 2024). Planning, starting and continuing to develop the programme and teaching individual courses in the programme has and will keep us busy for years to come so this is obviously a topic I will return to many many times in future blog posts.

The topic of this blog post is however a meta-topic, namely why there has been such a long hiatus and what the plans ahead are. 

1) Why haven't I written any blog posts for such a long time?

Here's the problem - I very much like to write/blog but I get carried away. Some blog posts become humungous. I'm not sure anyone reads them from start to end and it takes a hell of long time to write them. I don't know which is my longest blog post - there are many that are long - but this open letter from 2016 might, off the top of my head, very well be the longest text I've ever written here as it's more than 6500 words long - which is the same length as some academic articles... 

So my problem is that I blog and then progressively become more ambitious and over time spend more time writing longer texts. The hobby/activity of blogging then takes a lot of time (time that could have been spend reading or doing something else), it progressively becomes a burden and I end up suddenly taking an unplanned break. There have been several such breaks since I started to blog back in 2010, but these breaks have usually been "only" 3-9 months long. Over time, say during the last 20 years, I have just become progressively more busy in general and thus have had a harder time justifying spending (a lot of) time blogging.

2) What do I plan to blog about?

I will continue to blog about anything I feel like writing about, but almost all blog posts will in one way or another relate to and pertain to my work (job? calling?). A blog post could relate to courses and to teaching, to our new masters programme, to books I've read, to academic articles that I read or that I write or perhaps to a seminar, a workshop, a conference, a course or some other activity I have attend.

3) How often will I publish blog posts?

I will as always follow the plan I outlined in my very first September 2010 blog post, "Blog purpose and history". That means I still aim to write at least one blog post per week (probably Sundays) and at the most two blog posts per week (the second will then probably be published mid-week). 

This blog post is, by the way, blog post 605 since I started blogging 14 1/3 years ago. Despite several breaks, that's still a respectable 40+ blog posts per year on average - although the most active years were 2016, 2013 and 2014 when I wrote 91, 89 and 84 blog posts respectively. 

4) How will I make sure there is continuity? 

I have two "inventions" that I hope will increase continuity (e.g. no 6-month long blog breaks ahead). 

The first is that I will set a timer for 60 minutes before I start to write a blog post. A blog post should not take longer than 60 minutes to write (but could of course take shorter time to write). That means blog posts will be shorter than they have sometimes-often been, and I think that's all for the better. Not only do I not have time to write looong blog posts – you feel you don't have the time to read them... 

I guess it could be that I spend an hour writing the text and then some additional time with "post-production"; finding a nice image to illustrate the blog post, linking up the text, formatting and reading the text from beginning to end and other types of minor fixing.

The second is that I have decided to start with "Bullet Journaling" (sometimes referred to as "BuJo", see the image above). Some of my colleagues have done it for years and I will give it a try. I got a bullet journal as a Christmas present (I gave it to myself). That means I will set up an Index, a Future Log, a Monthly Log, a Weekly Log and a Daily Log as well as learn enough about the BuJo lingo and practices to get going. One of the BuJo tasks to keep track of on a weekly basis is then to write 1-2 blog posts, but the fact that I will better keep track of what needs to be done on a daily, weekly and monthly basis also means I can easily get inspiration about what to write about in the weekly blog post by just scanning these logs to get an overview of what I've done lately. The trick is to hold back and not over-exert myself (make sure I write no more than one or maximum two blog posts per week and make sure I spend no more than an hour writing any single blog post. Including this blog post (≈ 1150 words).

If you want to know more about Bullet Journaling (I'm a newbie), there's bulletjournal.com, a collection of 21 YouTube videos (3 hours in total) as well as of course also The Book by Bullet Journal inventor Ryder Carroll, "The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future" from 2018. I might buy the book in a few months if I find the method useful and want to learn more.

5) What next?

The tempo at work is hectic and there will be much to write about in January and during the remainder of the spring term. Some texts will probably also have a "retrospective" angle that will help bridge the 2.5 year long gap. I will write about my upcoming train trip to the continent (January) and about the two courses I myself will take during the spring term (both start in January). 

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