Ugh, Titles

It apparently doesn’t take much friction to keep me from blogging.

And there’s lots of reasonable friction in my life. A job. A sizable (and very patient) sideproject. A sizable (and very patient) family. A commute.

And reasonable-ish friction: Twitter, blog posts I want to read, conference talks to pitch.

But I recently realized something that adds completely unnecessary friction to my blogging: The desire to come up with a clever title for my posts. Is it some misplaced hope that they’ll blow up, and a clever title will make me look more intelligent? Some lock-in on the archetype of what a blog is supposed to look like? A pattern I fell into back when I ran a newspaper and wrestled for hours with just the right title to hook readers? Not sure.

That was one of the nice things that Tumblr got right — titles weren’t necessary. Just type and publish. I don’t know that I’ll bother to rework my template for this site, but — as a note to future Charlie — don’t get hung up on things that aren’t truly necessary. And maybe even try swinging the pendulum in the other direction.