Yesterday, LinkedIn sent me everything I’ve ever posted there:
- 1,680 posts
- 106,448 words
- January 2011 to August 2026
That’s more words than in any one of my eight books.
About 350 of the posts were cross-posted from Twitter in 2011. I long ago deleted my Twitter account and saved nothing afterwards so these “LinkedIn posts” are all that remain of it.
Between 2012 and 2017, most of my 456 LinkedIn posts were quite short.
In 2018, I had a psychiatric breakdown and didn’t post anything.
Starting in 2019, the posts became longer, totalling 67,071 words. This means 21% of my posts contain 63% of the writing.
Why am I doing this?
Sometimes it feels like the social media years were lost. I went in wholeheartedly and the platforms all became crummier. So I’m gathering the best from LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and saving it to my website.
I’ve had my website for nearly 25 years and I’d rather keep my archive all in one place – which, it turns out, is more or less the advice I was given back in 2010, when I interviewed a reputation expert for The Sunday Times.
Once I’ve done that, I’ll use some kind of tool to analyse the entire archive and identify patterns in my writing and illustrations, possibly discovering new topics.
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