80% Fewer Categories, 100% More Sanity

I’ve spent a few hours doing some long-overdue housekeeping on the site. Yes, sadly, it took that long—thanks, past me. Been a bit busy doing a couple minor things and some more major things.

The main job was dealing with categories and tags. Over the years, I’d grown a bit lazy, and things got messy and overlapping. It was making stuff harder to find for readers and for me. For anyone curious: categories are down from 52 to 8, and tags from 124 to 52. So roughly an 80% reduction in categories and about half the tags gone. Thrilling stuff. Truly peak admin work.

This was all about making things easier to find and giving the site a bit more structure. A few more tweaks will follow—like reviewing old titles and practicing better tag hygiene—but hopefully this makes things less annoying going forward. It’s going to be an ongoing process, really.

The New Rhythm

Reflecting on this, I’m moving to a new pattern to avoid burnout. The reason for that is the amount of work that went into January and the frustration I felt writing some of it. Plus, how annoying and negative it made me feel. I’ll be posting light-hearted pieces on Mondays and more serious analysis on Fridays, or longer-form content on Fridays.

This allows me to keep the quality high while building a better work ethic for the site. Instead of “Oh shit, I SHOULD write something” to keep to a quota, I’ve decided on a soft target of 8 posts per month. I’ll be finishing pieces ahead of time and holding onto them if they feel evergreen, though I’ll still drop spontaneous posts when the world demands it. Looking at tags and categories, there are certain ones I want to increase and improve the quality of, hence the light-hearted stuff for Monday.

Good news is nothing happened during January to demand certain posts, so that’s not why I’m doing this. Jokes aside, this cleanup was actually quite relaxing—music on, a quiet evening, and just sorting things out yesterday and today. As much as I like writing about that stuff, honestly, I enjoyed a break from it. Geopolitics and more is rather exhausting at the moment.

It’s easy to get lost sometimes and miss the bigger picture. The negative is easy to pick up, but the positive is often ignored. That’s why I’m going to try to be more positive this year. Reading books over winter has been a good way to decompress, along with putting less pressure on myself by doing stuff ahead of time. I’m quite happy with the quality of the pieces I’ve written. I may have to revisit some of the older ones and see if my opinion has changed. It’s probably on the cards, as I have ideas floating around that need writing about.

I’m sure readership that does not exist outside of myself will love these changes.