Why And How We Preschedule Posts
If there's one thing people love to see on a blog, it's self-indulgent meta-posting about the process of blogging – you're welcome.
Pre-scheduling posts is a psychological trick to maximize the chance that this blog continues to exist in future. Basically: most blogs seem to die because the authors hit some kind of life-or-writing block, where they fail to write anything for a number of months. If they don't pre-schedule any posts, that means the blog doesn't publish for a few months.
It's already hard in general to re-start a habit you've gotten out of, as anyone who's stopped going to the gym for a bit can attest, but I think it's extra-hard to re-start publishing after a long break: once a blog has been dead for a while, authors feel like their next post has to be "good enough" to justify suddenly troubling people's inboxes again.
At ATVBT, our lack of abilities and therefore low standards for Good Enough are already a bulwark against this issue, but pre-scheduling posts is another trick we keep up our sleeves.
Pre-scheduling posts has a definite Ants vs Crickets, storing-up-your-grain element that truly is difficult to manage psychologically. While you're on a writing kick and writing 2 posts per week, it's hard to imagine you'll ever hit a drought, so most authors either just pre-schedule minimally (one post per week till they run out of posts) or send out bonus posts while they have them.
But anyone who read about Joseph and his multicoloured dreamcoat as a child should know that this behaviour results in starvation and/or humiliating conversations with your little brother. You really should save up some poasting for a rainy day.
As a result, most of the time this blog has a bunch of time-insensitive content scheduled ~monthly for ~six months into the future. I guess the really smart thing would be to space the scheduled content even more – one per month for 3 months, then every couple months for 6 months, then every three months after that. [EDIT: when you say "I should really do X instead of Y," very often you should just immediately go and do X, so I went and re-scheduled our posts to taper out more at the end.]
In the meantime, we'll probably write other posts that are either more time-sensitive or that we're more excited about, and slot those in before the pre-scheduled ones. So your experience as a reader will be (theoretically) weekly newsletters, right to your inbox. But even if we fail to write anything new in 2025, we can be confident you'll at least get some atoms and bits in your inbox throughout the year.
My one great fear about this system is that eventually, by accident, one of these posts will be incredibly topical and in very poor taste unintentionally. If there has been a national scandal about pre-scheduled email systems immediately before you read this piece, I apologise – it was not intentional, this was written last year.
[edit: I apparently wrote a very similar post two years ago, and then forgot about it. Fortunately I believe in spaced repetition through newsletters].