When does inspiration strike you? At what time of day is the best for you? Does it hit you in a wave or like high tide slowly creeps up on you?

For me, inspiration or “flow state” happens at 4-5pm right at the end of the work day which causes a whole host of problems for myself. From the innocuous committing my fixes and waiting for our CI tests to pass before leaving work as I believe it is almost there. To starting to write project documents which will take me way past 7pm only to find out I have missed all the peak hour trains. To the pub!

I wonder if this is a common problem for other people who spent their teenage years gaming from 6pm to 2am. Or does it have something to do with technology in general? How we have trained our dopamine receptors that when we get off from work or school we start scrolling ours feeds, consuming TV late at night, chatting to everyone. We do this all through these tiny devises, eyes down, glued to our screens. Are all of these interactions and mental stimuli causing us instead of winding down after a hard days work to kept those electrical synapses firing. I know I won’t get to the bottom of it but I’ve managed to work around it.

One thing that I find myself envious of is people that can push out an interesting blog post every month! I too want to write more blog posts that are interesting and thought provoking. Because I am sick of these blog spam sites that are advertisements with content. When did the internet lose it’s interconnected feeling with people who enjoy similar topics? But that is a different thought for a different post that i will never write.

What to do then? How can I capture my spark and nurture it so I end up writing more posts than I ever have while providing something back the internet? One thing I am good at is hosting servers. Like my free git hosting with cicd. Be an enabler of yourself. I realised that those late nights, eyes in my screen the only thing stopping me from writing (besides from the idea) was the tools.

I use Jekyll as my blogging choice as I liked the simplistic idea of content + template = HTML. No longer do i need a mysql db or even PHP installed on my server. It is just good ol’ classic HTML. To go with the template route I’ve written all the posts on my blog in markdown. So if I want to write more blog posts I need something which can write in markdown and talk Git.

Now I have Markor on my phone which, not only has Jekyll post templates but is a nice way to write a post wherever I am. How do you write articles/posts? Let me know in the comments section to hear your ideas!