Navigating Blogging Across Time Zones

I like this blog to come out in the morning east coast time. 

I am a big fan of a routine, a ritual, a cadence.

That is partly why I blog every day, and that is why I like the blog to come out at roughly the same time every day.

It is also true that I have the most free time right after I wake up and then things get busy. So if I don’t blog right away, it is possible that I won’t find time to write that day.

When we go west for the winter, I do the same thing, writing as soon as I wake up, but 5am PT is 8am ET so readers will notice, and have noticed, that AVC comes out later in the winter months.

Traveling poses a bigger challenge. The last two Octobers, we have spent considerable parts of the month in Asia, twelve to fourteen hours ahead of NYC and even further ahead of the west coast of the US.

If I wrote my daily posts when I woke up in Asia, as I was tempted to do, they would have posted the night before in the US. And I didn’t want that.

So I waited until late afternoon, in the lull before heading out to dinner, and wrote then. That resulted in them posting early morning east coast time and the middle of the night on the west coast.

Honestly, that was not ideal for me. I found writing late in the day much harder with a full day of activity in my head. It was very challenging for me and I think the blogging suffered from that.

I’m back in the US now and yesterday’s post, which got a lot of pickup, was my first back in my regular ritual. 

I am glad to be back and I think this blog is too.

#Blogging On The Road

Comments (Archived):

  1. awaldstein

    You are a welcome part of my day Fred.Sometimes I dig in. Sometimes not.I depend on you to give me that choice.Welcome back!

  2. William Mougayar

    When you were in Asia, why couldn’t you write in the morning as usual, then schedule the posting to publish 12 hours later?

    1. Tom Evslin

      I use TypePad’s timed posting feature for that but am not as regular (or nearly as well read) as Fred.

    2. jason wright

      precisely – does Disqus provide that option?GMT (give me tech) at 07:30 with my soft boiled eggs please.Oh, and i would link this to yesterday’s post, but i wonder if it will be missed in the unremitting 24 blog cycle, and so here i place it;https://www.washingtonpost….and this is probably the article that sealed Jamal Khashoggi’s fate, but try to imagine what might happen to someone writing a harsh critique of Riyadh;https://www.washingtonpost….

      1. William Mougayar

        It’s a WordPress feature, not Disqus.

        1. jason wright

          it does exist? useful.

      2. Salt Shaker

        The King and MBS allegedly made separate calls to Khashoggi’s son on Sunday and apologized for his father’s death. “Sorry kid, we only meant to beat the shit out of him and/or kidnap him and bring him back home, to beat the shit out of him some more. You know how it is with operatives. Sometimes they get a bit too aggressive. It’s hard to find good, honest killers these days who won’t leave a trail of Skittles. How were we to know the Turk’s bugged our embassy? It’s all so appalling. Have a great day.”

        1. jason wright

          “separate calls” – telling.Apparently King Salman sent his most trusted and loyal personal advisor to Istanbul last week, and he pleaded with the Turks for help in curbing the behaviour of the Crown Prince, who was described as being ‘out of control’.Tomorrow Erdogan will be making a formal public statement on the affair. It could be the defining moment.p.s. this is the son barred from travelling abroad by the Al Saud regime.

          1. JLM

            .King Salman had been the Gov of Riyadh for 40 years and only became the Crown Prince after a brother died. His other brother, the prior King, died at 90. Salman was very loyal to his brother during his health problems.Salman, now 82, has been King since 2015, not a long time. MBS is his “favorite” son and has been the sword to execute the King’s reforms.MBS probably doesn’t see it that way preferring to think he is the de facto ruler.King Salman was supposedly the driver for Saudi 2030 – which I don’t believe. In his role as Gov of Riyadh, he was the mediator of royal family disputes.He has a ton of children, some of whom are well positioned to take over if MBS gets removed. He had 3 wives.King Salman has enormous health challenges — including spinal surgery, a stroke (lost the use of much of his left side), and dementia (believed to be Alzheimer’s related).I note this because I don’t think he has the personal strength to create an enormous upheaval of the Kingdom which would be required to get rid of MBS.MBS has control of the intelligence and military. He quickly consolidated his power and purged corrupt royals as well as rivals. He is a brutal and unabashed bastard.King Salman is widely known for saying that he opposed the democratization of the Kingdom as it is a loose affiliation of tribes and that every tribe would function as a political party. The House of Saud is the current tribal ruler.I share all of this because MBS will not likely give up his power. He will have to be taken out.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

          2. jason wright

            “He will have to be taken out.”by what method?

          3. JLM

            .Some other prince will begin to have a more public note.Then, the king will designate him as the Crown Prince while giving MBS a lower profile and a different portfolio — this will be big sign and the big trick to pull off.My personal choice is Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud.He is very interesting choice as he has extraordinary American relationships. He was so close to the Bushes he was called “Bandar Bush.”At 69, he will serve for 10 years and then MBS will return to the scene – maybe.Pure conjecture on my part.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

          4. jason wright

            We’re quite familiar with Prince Bandar here in the UK. He’s massively financially corrupt. Toy (not a typo) Blair decided it was not in the ‘national interest’ to continue with a Serious Fraud Office investigation of bribes he received from BAe Systems (just a couple of billion dollars). He has a nice pad in rural Oxfordshire, England. Massively corrupt, but he is a Saud. Par for the course.

        2. JLM

          .It will be interesting to see the size of the check they write.How do you call someone and say, “Sorry. We meant to beat him up, torture him, but it got out of hand. Our bad.”Medieval.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…

    3. Vasudev Ram

      Blogger (Google’s platform) has a scheduled post feature too, I use it sometimes.

    4. JamesHRH

      Because you are a 7 and he is a 5.You are process and abstract, he is feel and grounded. When the post is done, it’s gone from Fred’s mind.

  3. Seth Godin

    I’m looking for a wordpress feature that will let me publish a post 12 hours before I write it. Still no luck.

    1. Matt Zagaja

      The weird thing is that computationally it should not be challenging to implement. I often build web applications in Ruby on Rails that filter the items displayed from a database based on date and time.

      1. PhilipSugar

        You didn’t read his post closely enough.:-)

        1. LE

          There is actually a name that I have for the human behavior that explains the error that Matt just made. (Chunki-ng).Early on I found this in the printing business. When people review and proof difficult words they typically flag the errors. But if they see a word that they often use or know very well (in many cases a noun) their brain chunks the word and they don’t go letter by letter. And they miss the error. So for example ‘Philadelphia’ (or even your numerical address on a street) would be more likely to be misspelled than Yekaterinburg (in Russia). Chunki-ng.In the case of what Matt did he chunked the concept because it dovetailed perfectly in his brain with the gist of part of the post. I did the same thing. I scanned Seth’s comment and then I saw what you said and even the 🙂 but I didn’t immediately get what was going on. Then I read it slowly and now it makes sense Seth was making a joke. Now if he had put the -:) in his comment then my brain would have not done the same and I would have realized that something was up and been more careful.There are cases where you can actually use this phenomena to your advantage when writing emails.Other things psych wise going on as well with why this happens.

          1. PhilipSugar

            A huge part of what the brain does is pattern match. It is what it is.I don’t pattern match with my dress or truck. Much easier to pattern match if I have really nice clothes and my Volvo.Now for historically underprivileged and people that are politically correct this sucks, and I don’t debate.I told you that my wife has a friend that has this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…Now the cortisone injections didn’t work. They left scars. So in defiance she has her entire bald scalp tattooed.When I first saw her I reeled as a tattooed bald scalp in my pattern matching mind means something very different, than what it was.

          2. JamesHRH

            Alopecia sufferers are tough as nails.Love the tattoo idea.

          3. Mark Essel

            The tattoo idea is awesome, I love it.

          4. PhilipSugar

            She does not have one bit of hair on her body even her eyebrows and eyelashes are tattooed.It weakens the muscles, That is why she loves swimming in my pool.It is very, very noticable. Even a co-worker remembered her from high school. It must be tough.He said she used to wear a wig and the kids would tease her, and one day she came in with her bald head tattooed and didn’t wear a wig again.When you realize that is her lot in life you think, you go girl!!, but I did tell my neighbors because unless you know it can be disturbing.

    2. jason wright

      and i for one that will write it. no luck so far.

      1. Lawrence Brass

        you are robot fodder, Jason.. :-]

    3. Vasudev Ram

      Well, you could try asking one of these top Machine Learning companies to mine your past writings and then generate new similar ones on demand (or before demand). With just a shift here and a delta there (TM), their algos should be able to come up with stuff *seemingly* close to what you write.Note emphasis.

  4. LIAD

    wordpress has a bunch of plugins which allow a post to be written and then published at a later time.

  5. Matt Zagaja

    I too find writing in the morning to much easier than the afternoon/evening. My mental energy just gets too drained.

  6. PhilipSugar

    I agree. You know your mind is clear in the morning before everybody starts coming at you from all directions.I am serious I have some of my best thoughts in the shower and then go down and immediately write them up before doing anything else.People tell me that is TMI when I share that and the fact that I need to want to be out of that shower at least 80% of the time because I am excited for my day.

    1. awaldstein

      Yup.Now with two new clients out of Asia, I get up super early, walk, meditate, write then Skype every day now.I actually like the schedule. My cat loves it!

    2. LE

      I am serious I have some of my best thoughts in the showerIt’s different for different people of course but I think what drives this creativity at the core is a temporary case of mania (or happiness). When that happens things seem much more possible and barriers and negatives are removed in your brain. It’s really the opposite of nothing is possible feeling that someone can get when going through a rough time when everything seems like climbing a mountain.I get some of my best ideas eating dinner at night and reading the paper at the same time. The print paper. The paper that nobody reads anymore. And doing it literally 365 days per year some of those ideas have worked out very well and it’s effortless for me to come up with them.I have, like everyone, a screen grab utility on my desktop. If I see something I take a screen shot, overlay it with what my idea is, and then print it out and fold it for potential later use. If I am on mobile for some reason I will do a screen shot and then email it to myself for possible later use. I also have a utility that I wrote which runs in the terminal that allows me to print out a 3×5 card with any idea that I come up with and want to printout. I bought a dedicated printer just for 3×5 cards. I then just stack the cards for potential future use (I use the card printing routine for many things not just this; plus I number the cards so I can easily edit them if needed). This words much better than having to hand write a 3×5 card. The idea works so well that I bought a larger printer which will be dedicated to printing larger 4×6 or 5×8 cards. They cards stack nicely.I also have a terminal routine that simply sends what I write to a gmail account that I keep just for the purpose of notes and idea. Not that I couldn’t do it another way (database whatever) but it’s really the quickest way to dump something and have it for later future use if needed. This is way quicker than doing it from any email program. Much less typing. Works very well.

      1. PhilipSugar

        4×6 handwritten cards for me.

  7. Pointsandfigures

    Do you care if it gets a lot of “pick up”? meaning distribution. I used to care, and don’t anymore.

  8. JamesHRH

    Don’t you think yesteday’s post got pickup because it screamed MILLENIAL.