A Newsletter That’s Not About News and Is Not a Letter ⭐

I sent out the Thurrott Premium newsletter each of the previous two weeks. Except that I didn’t, as it turns out: We discovered an issue on the back end that prevented it from reaching most of those who opted in.

And that’s ... OK, at least beyond the handful of customer service emails we received since I’m promoting this newsletter again. And that’s because I’m still not entirely sure about the format. The easiest approach, which I took with those last two newsletters that most people didn’t get, is a simple roundup of the previous week’s posts, mostly Premium, hopefully led by a From the Editor’s Desk editorial. But aside from stressing over the issues, I’ve also been thinking about what this newsletter could be.

And I think it’s getting there. That is, I don’t think it will be the same thing every week, or even the same format. Sometimes it will be short. Sometimes long. It will evolve.

The problem with relying on an Editor’s Desk editorial is that they’re not always there. At some point, I’ve told all the stories I have, and I’ve relayed whatever it is I think I’ve learned. Life happens, of course, so there’s always more. But delivering something like that on a weekly basis isn’t always possible. Plus, in the BWW days, when a Thurrott Premium newsletter went out like clockwork thanks to people like George and Tonya, my only regret was that those editorials were only in the newsletter. So some are either lost or would need to be manually found and entered into the site back-end, a tedious task no one wants to do.

Tied to this—and yes, I will eventually get around to some point here, I promise—I hate, hate, hate anything tied to a schedule. I was always bad with deadlines, but thanks to 30+ years of working from home and then, more recently, a pandemic that cut down on my work travel significantly and, I think, permanently, this normal facet of most people’s day to day lives is of even less interest to me. I don’t set an alarm unless I’m flying early that day, for example, and I just kind of do things the way I do things. Balancing this, I work 7 days a week. So I can always get things done. Just not on some 9-to-5 schedule.

That this isn’t entirely healthy isn’t lost on me. Burnout is perhaps a good topic for a future editorial. (Makes a note in Notion. Which, come to think of it, is another good topic.) But for now, the Premium newsletter can occur even if there isn’t an Editor’s Desk-style editorial each week. It can just be something different each week.

Ironically, I actually do have a From the Editor’s Desk-type topic on my mind for this week. But in the interest of mixing things up a bit, here is one example of something different first. This falls into the same rough category as What I Use and those end-of-year round-ups for top stories, hardware, e-books and audiobooks, apps, services, and games, podcasts, and music. Sort of. So it will hopefully be of interest to some.
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