When can you expect my next blog post?

Just in case you're one of those wondering whats with the series of posts in my blog over the past few days, yes I did make 4 posts in 3 days. Now, let me help you understand why and also possibly answer the question in this posts' title, by digging into some data in the background.

Since I resumed blogging early last year, I've posted 90 articles here. Lets first look at the rhythm of posting, something that I've written several time earlier about, and have been striving extra-hard to maintain. The posting pattern over the nearly 2-year period is as follows:

From the above its clear that I've managed to maintain some consistency over the months; an average of 4.04 posts per month. However, whats not obvious here is the posting pattern within the month. To understand potential effect of my self-imposed monthly deadline, we'll have to look at when the posts are made within each month.

I've split each month into 3 periods: 1-10th, 11-20th and 21st until end of the month. When the monthly aggregation is broken down into these periods, some patterns start emerging. I've made a small correction for the bulk-publishing of my back-packing diary, which incidentally was posted in the middle of the month (17th May '15), after weeks of writing. I've changed the value of '17 posts' on this date to an above-average number of '2 posts', as an approximation.

The below table is coloured to show which of the 3 periods within a month have most posts, over the last 2 years. Its obvious that I've hardly made any posts in the first 10 days of any month (red shaded cells below), while the last 10 days are fertile periods, showing up in green. Most of the posts are generally made in the last 10 days of a month, at times spilling over into the last few days within this cycle.

What this also means is that roughly two-thirds of all posts are made a few days before the deadline! Old habits die hard, so guess I'll have to change the deadline to a weekly one as opposed to monthly. Perhaps, that could help spread out the posts through the month.

Hopefully my next post would be earlier than the 30th of December, though the above analysis strongly suggests that as the possible answer!