The end of the year is always a good time to look back on what you have done in the past 365 days and figure out what you want to change for the new year. For bloggers like me, this means looking back on the work you created and consider if you’re writing things you’re proud of.

Exactly 1 year and 1 day ago I wrote this:

I’m very proud of the work I’ve done online in 2016, but the theme of 2017 is going to be focus.

That means a lot of things, but for BirchTree it means fewer posts than before. I wrote 324 pieces in 2016 over 345 days. That’s basically 1 per day, but maybe that’s too much. Looking at my stats, almost half of my views are on the 10 most popular posts this year, which is kind of insane, but speaks to quality over quantity.

I actually did live up to this in 2017. As of today, I have posted 232 times since January 1, which is about 30% less than in the year previous. Mission accomplished, right? Well, yes, actually! I was able to cut out the cruft all the while continuing to grow the reach of BirchTree¹.

One unintended side effect of this decision is that I didn’t really have an outlet to share my thoughts on smaller things. I had created a blog where I felt nothing was worth writing about unless I had 1,000+ words to say about it. I don’t want to just write a bunch of Daring Fireball-style link posts, but I’d like to give myself permission to write 200 words on something and not feel like I have to compose it in a tweet storm.

I’m not going to start micro-blogging or anything², but consider this fair warning you might be getting a few more posts in your RSS reader in the next year. I hope that’s okay with you. 🙂