One of my winter goals is to tidy up my drafts. My WordPress admin is actually fairly clean in other respects, but one thing that I keep going back to is the fact that I have 57 drafts sitting there.

How do you get to 57 blog post drafts? Mostly by starting to write posts and getting distracted, making a mental note to take and add photos and then never doing so, and forgetting to post time-sensitive posts (why hello there year review of 2013).

This is why I keep circling around this task, meaning to do something about it and never quite managing to make that fundamental decision of whether to hit ‘Publish’ or ‘Bin’.¹

Some of those drafts are the beginnings of rants which can be turned into useful advice – how to optimise your blog homepage for search engines, and why stats about what time to post on social media are useless, for example.

Some are the beginnings of round ups of events from years ago, or diary-like rambles which are interesting from a ‘this was my life’ point of view but aren’t at all relevant to today’s blog.

One or two are quotes or links from friends that have somehow ended up as their own post draft. My favourite of these is one from years ago by one of my old school friends, Mel, which simply says, ‘ur jen tho, u can do anything and then more besides’. It’s from years ago, but it helps motivate me when I see it because I always forget it’s there.

The vast bulk, probably 75% or so, are difficult to read. They’re all from times I was feeling particularly low and writing helped me a lot in expressing my struggles. Even though I’ve posted a lot of very personal stuff here in the past, there were some that were just so personal that I decided to think about it before posting them and then never did. These are by far the hardest posts to deal with, because although they range from extreme depression to fighting, there’s no clear progressive path towards the happiness I have now. They’re all over the place. There is no happy ending contained in those words.

Many of them are also a lot more artistic than my usual style, with language that twists and turns and swoops to tell a story. A story of a person who is different to who I am now in every single way. I think they would work well as sections of a book, but I don’t think it’s a book I want to write, at least right now. My current self is more than a little scared of how bad it was. This post is proving difficult enough.

On the flip side, I don’t think depression and anxiety are topics that are expressed well enough in mainstream culture. There are many cartoons and images and blog posts that do a good job, but no real films or books that cover it in a way I’d like to see (or if there are, I haven’t come across them – feel free to recommend). Today’s mentally ill person is the child of yesterday’s leper.

I figured that one way to finally get through these drafts is to blog about them (so meta) and try and use that as a push to make proper decisions about them. Some I’ll just publish as they are, and post links to on Twitter as they’ll be backdated and won’t appear on the front page of the blog. Some I’ll turn back into basic titles to go back on my blog ideas list (ironically, that in itself is another draft in WordPress but it saves me having to hunt for it so it’s totally worth doing – maybe I should move it to ToDoist though).

The rest I think I’ll keep as they are for now. As I was writing this post I decided to look at potential plugins and it turns out there’s one called Quick Drafts Access, which I think I can tweak to do what I need (i.e. create a ‘Private Drafts’ section for things I’ll never publish to separate them from my recent drafts). It feels cleaner and seems like a good way to create a division between old and new – posts and Jenni.

Do you have any bad blogging habits or things you’re planning to clean up this year?