The Pain of Posting (And Finally Fixing It)

I hate posting.

What a pain.

I’m not the type to throw random thoughts online. If I’m going to post something, I want it to provide value — maybe not thrilling material, but at least something someone out there can use. But that mindset also makes posting feel heavier than it should.

Because if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right.
And whether my definition of “right” is too strict, too loose, or even makes sense at all… I couldn’t tell you. What I do know is that posting has become a long list of steps that all need attention:

• writing the blog post
• sending it to different platforms
• creating the featured image
• filling out alt text, titles, captions
• copying everything over to Substack
• Adding promotional sections manually
• reformatting everything so it looks decent

It’s a lot.
More than it needs to be.

And maybe it sounds like I’m complaining, and maybe i am, it is really just a small thing that kept getting in the way. Every time I had to plan when I would post something — figuring out how long it would take, which steps I’d have to remember, and what I might forget — that was time I could’ve spent doing something I actually wanted to be doing.

And it’s not like I don’t have material.
Articles? Oh, I’ve got articles — half-baked ideas scattered everywhere, many of which may never see the light of day. The problem was always the last step: dreading having to stop what I was doing to perform this whole posting routine.

I decided I’d had enough of this and set out to streamline the process.
Surprisingly, the fix was simple: I enabled the RSS feed import on Substack.
Then I built two rotating code-snippet blocks that automatically insert my promo items into every blog post.

It’s just a couple of small improvements, but they definitely help. And those small improvements add up. There are other, slightly more complicated ways to accomplish the same thing, and if I ever find the need to explore them, I’ll post about it.

This is the first post since making those changes, and it feels noticeably easier. I can sit down and write without worrying about whether I remembered every little step. I can focus on the part that matters: the words.

Bit by bit, removing unnecessary steps makes the whole process smoother. And if that means I can write more freely, then the effort was worth it.