On Sunday I was working on my blog. I wanted to add some Web Weekly content. I was looking at the existing 3 Web Weekly posts and I thought it was time to move them to their own collection.

I’m using Jekyll to load my site so I’m kinda stuck with how this needs to be implemented. Though this may seem like a limitation, hopefully in the long run it will force me to focus on what’s important. The details of how this works are not relevant to this post.

I believed this would take me about an hour and then I’d have my Web Weekly collection. And then I got stuck.

I couldn’t get the collection to be part of my feed.xml file. This file contains my blog post feed, which is used by MailChimp for email distribution. But I couldn’t merge in the Web Weekly collection.

At first I thought maybe I can join the feeds together on MailChimp. Nope. No easy way to do that. I also don’t want to pay extra for this or have any additional MailChimp administration.

Next I thought maybe I could configure the jekyll-feed plugin somehow. Back and forth with ChatGPT. Back and forth with Google search. Still no way to merge the feeds.

Then I thought maybe I could write the code for the feed.xml file. But this was going to take a bit of research based on the way my Jekyll site is setup.

Times up!

An hour goes by fast. What have I accomplished? Nothing. I thought to myself, “Maybe I should try a little bit more.” Then I asked myself, “What are the consequences of not doing this?” Nothing. It might be better if I do it, but it certainly won’t be worse. So why bother?

I wish I asked myself this question before I started, “What are the consequences of not doing this?” This should be what drives my personal and professional priorities everyday.

With negligible consequence, this is a task that should be deferred or delegated. I have no one to delegate this to at the moment. There is no strong positive outcome for this task right now. So it will be deleted.

The workaround right now is to use the tags. This is perfectly fine.

If this becomes a pain point for readers, I will assess the situation in that moment. Not before. Even though I was hoping to make things easier prettier for myself, I just wasted time for a small potential return on investments (ROI). I need to focus on larger ROIs.