Preventatives:
- Publishing friction: Have something to share but have to get approval first, or go through editorial process. Anything that puts time between thought inception and publishing is detrimental. Personal blogs/Tumblr excel at this, highly edited sites do not.
- High effort: Longer-form, high quality writing takes a lot of effort. When writing is a side-project or labor of love it's tough to justify high-cost.
- Expectation: If I write something, will people expect me to write again? I'm not sure it's an expectation/pressure I want to create for myself. Personal blogs can create this sense of expectation whereas community sites don't.
- Channel mis-match: This thing I want to talk about isn't right for channel X (where X is a personal blog, company blog, etc…). Could be because of the topic, scope or medium.
- Lack of topic confidence: I'm not confident my ideas are worthy or not. What if I'm wrong? Afraid to expose myself to public shaming.
Motivators:
- Recognition: People visiting the article (metrics), talking about it, responding. Knowing who you are. Secondary opportunities like conferences etc…
- Regularity: When have an established publishing cadence, it's easier to be motivated to do the next topic. Inverse is also true (see expectation).
- Education: Wanting to educate others based on your experience. Could be altruistically or because conclusions align w/ something you're a proponent of.
I tend to do essay writing on the side, circulated among my peers and no further. For preventatives, high effort is the only one that applies to me. Ironically, the purpose of writing it out is to force precise thought, but the programmer in me tells me that once I've got the outline done, the 80/20 rule has taken effect. Thus, I tend to hamstring my own desire for precise thought with my pragmatism.
My motivators tend to run along the lines of exploration, solidification of thought, and potentially along educational lines, long-term.