## Publishing record I was going over the datapoints of understanding how the process of writing and publishing "On the side". In broad strokes, the publishing is semi-regular. I looked at the number of issues I have written annually. ![[Yearly Issue Publication Graph.png]] The top half of the chart shows the published issues and the bottom half shows the timeline plot with a gap in between publishing issues. The goal was to publish it weekly and so far the process as shown below hasn’t resonated that picture until this past year. 2022 was back of winding down [[Stumbling into founding a venture|Subjimandi]] and joining as an operator at the acquired startup. Most of my writing back then was posts being delivered via newsletter. This continued till the June end of 2023. I decided to refactor the [[On the side|newsletter]] to its current structure. I took up the new [[Current full time role - Product Manager|role]] in August of 2023 and paused writing for 2 months. That’s when the second exceptional variation showed up. It was succeeded by the long gap in 2024, almost 6 months. The time was pre-occupied by the personal events I had ongoing. I could barely keep my head above water at work and a lot of it was riding on doing a good job and I completely dropped the ball on writing front. I tried to pick it up in the end of 2024 but I just didn't have the time and bandwidth to catch up. ![[Newsletter Issue Days Chart-XMR.png]] In 2025, I tried to focus on reps and made time, albeit in the last minute to write. I still missed many weeks but the variation as outlined in the XMR chart above improved. 2026 marked the 100 issues milestone and since then I have written 19 more. I now can spend much less time finishing writing an issue once I finalise the topic, which takes the entire week. I took summer vacation of 1 month for stepping away and solely focusing on personal stuff. Barring that 1 major gap, I have tried to stay consistent in the recent past. ## Topics covered and interconnections I wanted to see different dimensions and topics I have written in the newsletter. The classification is too meta but it represents my state of on the side learnings as I navigated my life over the last 4 years. ![[Articles by Topic 2022-2026.png]] I have been called out by my friends for spending too much time in abstract. I have tried to make it more concrete by citing examples in the fields I work in. This past year was solely focused around sales, product building and AI with logistical examples and you can start seeing it in 2026 stats. The way I write these issues doesn't align with just one topic. In the next one, I mapped the interconnectedness and plotted a graph where topics are nodes. ![[Pasted image 20261111213005.png]]Quite a few multi-threaded posts in the archives. One of the pitfalls of being more consistent is that I have fallen to just focusing on what I do at work and lessons learnt from it. I need to bring back the side quests that I want to pursue and write more about the topics I am learning on the side. **** ## Closing thoughts I have been writing this newsletter regularly now and hopefully this post doesn't end up jinxing it. I don't track the open rates but about 42 people are subscribed to it. Quite a few of them are from work. I am going to continue this process and check back on its progress at 200 maybe. I don't think it will take another 4 years to get there. Overall, I am pretty content that I spend some part of my time writing and building a body of work that is [[Being in public is WIP|publicly accessible]] for anyone to read and reach out. *** `Tags`: #ontheside #reflection `Published` : 11-11-26