How to Blog When You’re Busy, Impatient, or Just Overthinking It

A few years ago, I sat on a panel at a Marketing leadership event. Someone in the audience asked, “How do you blog consistently?” Every panelist leaned in like they had a productivity hack that would change the world. I cringed a little.

The reality: none of us were blogging as often as we wanted. Most of us struggled to even start.

Why? It wasn’t time. None of us were lazing around. The real blocker was uglier - a cocktail of perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and impatience. I didn’t want to publish something that fell flat, said nothing new, or made me look dumb to my team. So I’d stall, edit to death, or - my favorite - just never start.

Sound familiar? Most smart technical leaders I coach go through the same nonsense. “I should write about X, but does anyone even care? Will my team nitpick? What if it’s obvious and I look clueless?” Then we overcomplicate things. Pages of draft ideas. Outlines. A Notion graveyard. And in the end, nothing actually gets shipped.

Here’s my take after a decade of trial and error:

Blogging is way easier (and more useful) when you treat it like shipping software. Not a novel, not a TED Talk. Ship something small, often, and real.

Idea 1: Write like you talk - just get the concept across

Nobody expects you to outdo Paul Graham. You’re not writing to impress Hacker News. You’re writing to help one version of you from six months ago.
So lower the bar. Say the thing simply. Don’t edit into oblivion. Hit publish when the point is clear (not when it’s perfect). No one hates a short, raw post that teaches them something. People hate a know-it-all voice or bloated, abstract nonsense.

Idea 2: Your best posts come straight from real work

You don’t need to invent new frameworks or pontificate about “the future of X.” Care about hiring? Write about the botched candidate experience you fixed last week. Screwed up a launch? Walk through what you missed and what you’ll never do again.
Your experience is way more valuable than you think. I have clients who landed speaking gigs - not from polished thought leadership, but from doggedly honest, flawed recaps of what actually happened inside their teams.

I tell every exec I coach the same thing: Stop trying to be smart. Be useful. Talk about what you just did, what you learned, what flopped. Ship the insight.

This shows up weekly wherever I work

At one SaaS company, coaching the CPO, I asked him to blog about something he was already ranting to me about over coffee. (Comp plans, specifically.) He wrote three paragraphs in under 15 minutes. Posted it, warts and all. Email from a peer in his inbox inside half an hour: “Thank you - no one’s naming this.” Another client, a product lead, started a monthly teardown of failed launches. It made him famous at his next gig. People crave specifics. They value candor.

But almost nobody is willing to be honest, short, and a little messy.

The takeaway: Blog like you make product - release, learn, repeat

If you want to take pressure off yourself, just treat your blog like your product roadmap. Small, regular releases. You’ll get better by hitting publish, not by obsessing over the draft. Nail one sharp post out the door, and things get easier every time.

What would happen if you started seeing blogging not as a performance, but as just… sharing what you’re already learning? Got a sticky hiring story? Something your team keeps tripping on? That’s your next post - mess and all.

Go get it out. Ship it.

Because someone needs it, and the longer you wait, the more they’re stuck. And that's not why you started leading in the first place.