This is post one fifty. 150. One hundred and fifty blog entries.

It is hard to believe I arrived at this milestone so quickly.

The first blog entry was made on May 24th 2013. The 100th post was made on May 10th 2014, 351 days later. Today, July 23rd, 2014, I am making the 150th blog post 60 days after making the 100th.

This suggests an improvement of almost 300 percent. That is significant.

This calculation is based on 100 posts in 351 days being comparable 50 posts in half that time, an estimated 175 days. One hundred seventy five divided by sixty implies an improvement factor of 2.9 rounded up to 3. This improvement has occurred over a period of 425 days, or 1.16 years.

I find it sobering to reflect it took more than a year to achieve this change. From a 425 day perspective this improvement does not appear to be much of an accomplishment at all. I am trying hard to celebrate this milestone, to focus on the fact of a positive improvement as opposed to reflecting on the amount of time required to effect the change.

There are other problems with this metric. The time when few posts were made typically coincides with the periods I devoted all my time to the production of a written submission to the insurance company, or similar body. Writing the submission took all of my time. Little, or none, was left available for the blog initiative.

In retrospect, I see a sequence of phases leading up to the present. This sequence starts with my first letter to the insurer in July of 2012. This was five pages in length and took more than a month to write. This is roughly equal to one blog post a week, or one post every six days. By the time I reached the 100 post milestone, I was delivering a post every 3.5 days. As of milestone 150, I am entering a post every 1.2 days.

There was a significant amount of effort associated with the insurance appeal document  written from November 2012 to January 2013. I worked extremely hard to complete the appeal and I credit that effort with helping to establish many of the work routines I still rely on today.

In the early days of the blog, I had difficulty coming up with topics. I didn’t know what to write about. Many of the early posts are just snippets of prose. I am also aware of the fact that I shied away from writing posts on depression. Who would want to read a series of posts that all begin “I am really down?” Even I didn’t want to read such material, so I forced myself to seek out other topics.

It was not until early this year that I developed a sort of feedback loop between my day to day experience and the creation of a blog post reflecting on that experience. When I engaged in this way there was a clear positive outcome. I became more observant of myself, and my behaviours, developed a greater ability to assess my actions, increased my ability to draw appropriate conclusions and inferences. This increased self awareness was captured in the blog posts. The blogging effort provoked further insight and this insight inspired a further series of posts and subsequent deeper insight.