If you noticed I went quiet, you noticed right.
When I started publishing under this brand I came out hot, full-on Weaponized ADHD™. One year after winning the RIF award from my previous company, I had a renewed energy and excitement about technology. A new fire had erupted inside me that hasn't burned since I was a teenager. This energy poured into my article cadence, cross-platform spokes, my interactions with curious parties, the whole machine cranking out a piece a day plus the supporting noise. 16 - 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, building and writing about it.
That was sustainable for exactly as long as it was sustainable, which turned out to be a finite stretch. The pace I set the first month was the pace I started measuring myself against in month three. Classic move. Anyone who has tried to do this solo is nodding right now.
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A few things hit at once.
The LinkedIn audience was growing. Attention was real. Paid work was not. I posted, I got reach, I got engagement, I got the metrics the platform rewards. None of it converted to the consulting work I needed it to convert to.
Eyes don't pay rent.
I don't have a job. I haven't had one for almost 16 months now. Over the past 6 years, I planned exactly for this scenario. What I did not plan for was starting a new home-lab and attempting to go into business for myself. Both projects need funds to expand and I don't have the funds. That's a stress profile that grinds.
The year mark on my father's death is coming up. It's been hitting me hard. There's still lingering grief. Anniversaries don't ask politely whether your project schedule has room for them. They just arrive. And this one came way too fast.
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So I hit the wall a few weeks back. Totally ran out of gas. Most of this month I've been off the project. Tending to my garden. Tending to my dog. Tending to my sanity. Catching up on The Blacklist. Doing anything in the physical world to avoid the stack or the writing about the stack.
I'm not going to dress that up. It wasn't a strategic sabbatical. It wasn't a planned content hiatus. It was an over-extended solo operator with grief in the background and a financial squeeze in the foreground stepping back from the keyboard because the alternative was breaking something I wasn't going to be able to put back together.
Small operators don't get to pretend life isn't happening to them. The content gets built around life. When life turns up the volume, the content gets quieter.
That's the simple fact.
What the cadence looks like from here? I don't know. That's the honest answer.
There's no posting schedule I'm going to commit to and miss. There's no editorial calendar I'm going to publish and ignore. The articles will come when there's a real one to write. Some weeks that'll be 5. Some weeks that'll be zero. Some stretches I'll be elsewhere and the writing will wait.
If that means fewer eyes, fewer subscribers, fewer of whatever the platforms measure, then fewer of those.
The leash.
Here's what I learned this round, in plain terms. Building an audience does not equal building a business. Engagement metrics are not customers. Attention is a vanity number until it converts, and conversion is its own discipline that has nothing to do with how many people clicked the heart button.
The constant-publishing demand is a leash. Engagement metrics are the leash. The treadmill of "post or disappear" is a leash. It's designed to extract output from you on a schedule that serves the platforms, not the work and not the operator running the work.
I clipped the leash on myself the first time around and did not receive the results I was hoping for.
Not this time.
The project continues. The cadence will be whatever the cadence is. If you're here for the work, you're in the right place. If you're here for daily content, you're going to be disappointed...
See you when there's something to say.
