I haven’t been blogging anywhere near as much as I was in December, but I have kept in mind the resolution I made at the end of that month. That is, this:

Post, on average, 30 posts each month. This is like my own personal NaBloPoMo. One thing that irritated me about this event was the need to post EVERY SINGLE DAY — compensating by posting two posts another day was not an option. So I will alter the rules just for myself, to remove the need for useless asides.

Luckily for myself there are a number of ways to interpret this. “On average” is so ripe for alternative interpretations, and I’m glad I added it to the resolution rather than just writing “Post 30 posts each month” (which I would already have failed!). Here are some ways I could decide to enforce this resolution:

  • 360 posts in a year (since 360 ÷ 12 = 30).
  • The median post count is at or above 30.
  • I exclude outliers and then find the average post count, and the average is above 30.
  • I look at all the months’ post counts at the end of the year and the most frequent one is 30.

I don’t think that last one is particularly relevant, since it would discourage me from posting any more than 30 posts, and what if there were no repeats over the whole year? Then every number would be a mode! But I was running out of ways to calculate averages.

Probably the fairest way to calculate is a combination of the first two — I make 360 posts over the whole year, and the median is at or above 30. The third one also seems pretty fair, provided I remember how to calculate outliers and don’t just exclude really low numbers because I dislike them. However, it would mean that I couldn’t post about 150 posts in December while trying to catch up!

Regardless of what is fair, you can bet that I’ll calculate the average in any way that helps me win! You know, like a creative accountant.