Neil Hawkesford

Making time for a personal project doesn’t always mean finding a free day. Sometimes it means going out again after work, or sitting down to write for an hour, even just making a few notes in a coffee break

I’ve never been particularly disciplined.

I’ve tried forcing myself. I’ve tried the focus systems, the productivity methods, the promises that this time I’d stick to a perfect routine. Some of them helped for a while. None turned me into the sort of person who leaps out of bed at five every morning, delighted to tackle a long list of goals.

But I have built things I cared about.

When I was younger, I spent evenings after work rebuilding and repairing my rally car, getting it ready for the weekend. When I wrote my books, I made time to sit at my desk and write in chunks. And when I built my boat, Gleda, I often worked a full day, came home, grabbed something to eat and headed straight out to the barn.

I learned not to sit down first.

It wasn’t a glamorous routine. I was tired. The barn could be cold, the weather could stop me, and sometimes I’d get there and make little progress. But the boat mattered to me, so I kept going back.

The long game

Gleda was not a weekend project that came together in a burst of enthusiasm. It took years. I was working full-time, and the build had to fit around work, the weather, money, energy and all the ordinary demands of life.

In the first 100 days, I recorded 124 hours of actual building time. That didn’t mean 124 hours of effortless progress. There were days when I was ill or worn out, weeks when work pulled me away, and times when the cold or damp made the work impossible. I sometimes had to stop, rethink a task and try another way.

But the hours added up. By the end of the first year, I’d spent 629 hours on the boat. The first pieces of plywood had become two hulls. Gleda was no longer just an idea in my head, I could touch her, see her.

What kept me going wasn’t perfect discipline. It was seeing the project move from one stage to the next, and knowing that even a modest amount of progress was still progress.

I came to understand that a project this big was more likely to succeed through slow, steady movement than through occasional heroic sprints. Some days I could do a lot. Some days I could do very little. There were weeks when I did nothing at all. The point was to keep moving when I could, and not mistake a pause for the end.

It doesn’t have to be a boat

Most people aren’t building a boat. But the same question comes up with any dream: Where will I find the time?

I don’t think there’s one answer. We don’t all have the same responsibilities, health, money, working hours or support. Some seasons of life leave very little room for personal projects. “Just work harder” is not helpful advice when someone is already stretched to breaking point.

But I also know that the things we care about tend to find a place in our lives. My rally car got my evenings. My books got time at the desk. Gleda got a lot of nights after work, most weekends, and, when I could manage it, longer stretches.

I wasn’t consistent in the way productivity books might recommend. I didn’t need to be. I needed to return to the work.

A question worth asking

There’s an uncomfortable thought here, and I don’t want to turn it into a judgement of anyone else’s life. But when I kept telling myself I had no time for something I said I wanted, I eventually had to ask whether I wanted it enough to make room for it.

Not every dream survives that question. Some are borrowed from other people. Some belong to another stage of life. And sometimes the answer is simply that now is not the time.

But if the dream is still yours, you may find yourself making room, not effortlessly, and not every day, but in the gaps and pockets you can manage. You don’t need to become a productivity expert. You don’t have to wait until life is perfectly organised. You can begin with the next small piece of work.

A boat begins with pieces of wood. A book begins with a few lines. A rally car gets prepared one nut and bolt at a time.

You may not know exactly how long the journey will take. I certainly didn’t when I started Gleda. You only need enough time to take the next step, and a reason to return when you can.

It sounds simple: do what makes you happy.

But I don’t think it’s simple at all.

It can be easier to do what is expected, to keep going with the plan already in motion, or to accept somebody else’s idea of a good life. Those choices can look sensible from the outside. They may even be sensible. The difficulty is noticing whether they are choices we have made, or choices we have gradually stopped questioning.

I’ve learned that knowing what I want is not a matter of finding one answer and keeping it forever. It asks for a more ordinary kind of honesty: paying attention, then paying attention again. What matters to me now? What am I doing because I value it, and what am I doing because I’ve never thought to choose differently?

When I decided to build a boat I could live aboard, I’d found something that felt unmistakably mine. But that didn’t mean I’d suddenly worked myself out. It meant I’d found a direction worth taking seriously. The years of building Gleda taught me a great deal about commitment and persistence. They also taught me that a clear desire is not a guarantee, or a complete map of the life ahead.

Perhaps that’s one reason it can feel risky to admit what we want. Once we name a desire, we may have to consider what it asks of us. We might have to change something, disappoint someone, or discover that the thing we imagined is not quite what we need. It can feel safer to keep the wish vague, or to call it impractical before we’ve even examined it.

There’s another risk too: finding out that our wants are not entirely our own. We absorb ideas about success from families, schools, workplaces and the people around us. Some of those ideas may fit us. Others may simply be familiar. If we never stop to ask, we can spend a long time pursuing a life that looks right without knowing whether it feels right to live.

This is not an argument against duty or responsibility. We all have people and commitments that matter. And happiness is not the only measure by which to make a decision. But it seems worth asking whether duty has become a convenient way to avoid hearing ourselves, or whether “being sensible” sometimes means not having to risk wanting something different.

I don’t think the answer is to force ourselves to decide immediately. Sometimes pushing for certainty just produces a quick answer: the one that sounds admirable, safe or easy to explain. A gentler question may be more useful: What keeps returning to my attention? Not necessarily as a grand dream. It might be a small preference, a curiosity, a kind of work that absorbs us, or a way of spending a day that leaves us feeling more like ourselves.

Then there’s the less glamorous work of checking. Do I still want this? What am I giving up for it? Is the cost one I accept, or one I’ve been pretending not to see? Are my circumstances different now? Changing your mind does not automatically mean you were wrong before. It may mean you’re just paying attention to who you are now.

That kind of questioning can make us feel foolish. We may discover that we’ve mistaken approval for desire, or that we’ve kept pursuing something long after it stopped mattering. I’ve certainly found that the picture I had of myself was not always the same as the person I was. That’s an uncomfortable feeling, but it’s also useful. If I can see the difference, I can begin to choose with more honesty.

You may not find one deep, permanent answer to the question of what you want. Perhaps the answer changes as your life changes. Perhaps it’s made up of several things that don’t fit neatly together. The point is not to turn every passing feeling into a command. It’s to stop treating your own preferences as irrelevant before you have even listened to them.

So, ask yourself, not only once, but now and then: What do I want? What do I value? Which parts of my life have I chosen, and which have I simply inherited or drifted into?

You may not like every answer. You may find that you know less about yourself than you thought. But being willing to find that out is a start. And the next honest answer does not have to decide your whole life. It only has to help you see what is yours to choose.

For a long time, I let other people and circumstances decide the direction of my life. I took the jobs, accepted the arrangements and tried to make the expected version of things work. I was doing what seemed sensible. More than once, I also got kicked in the teeth for it.

By 2006, I was worn down. A relationship had ended, and I found myself alone in a rented flat, asking how I had lost so much again. I didn’t have a neat plan for what came next. But somewhere beneath the hurt was a memory I could no longer ignore: the years I’d spent living aboard a little boat called ‘Mor Gwas’, and how alive and happy I’d felt then.

I’d lost that boat decades earlier. I’d returned to ordinary life and put the sailing dream away. Yet, it had never really gone. I began to understand that I didn’t simply want another boat. I wanted to recover some say in the shape of my own life.

That distinction mattered. “I want to be happy” is a feeling, not a direction. “I want to build a boat I can live aboard and sail away in” was something I could begin to investigate. It was specific enough to give me a next step, without pretending I knew every step after that.

I’d been fascinated by the Wharram catamarans since I first saw one in 1983. Now I studied the designs and chose a Tiki 38: a boat big enough to live on and designed for ocean sailing, but small enough for me to build by myself. I called her ‘Gleda’ an Old English name meaning ‘happiness’.

The choice was not a sudden leap into a ready-made adventure. I still had a job, little money and practical problems to solve. I needed somewhere to build within commuting distance of work, and I couldn’t afford an industrial unit. I searched, advertised and eventually found a barn less than five miles from my office. It leaked and needed work, but it was the right size, place and price. I bought the plans, nearly emptying my bank account, and started arranging the materials.

I remember how different I felt once I had committed. A few months earlier I’d felt lost. Now I had a purpose, a place to work and a project that was mine. I didn’t know exactly how it would all turn out. I did know what I was trying to do.

That didn’t make the years that followed easy. Building _‘Gleda’ _took more than seven years. There were cold nights in the barn, slow stretches when progress was hard to see, mistakes, materials problems, work pressures and plenty of moments when the project felt too big. I kept learning and adjusting. The boat grew one piece at a time: timber, plywood, epoxy, more sanding than I care to remember.

I’m not offering this as proof that wanting something makes it happen, or that everyone should abandon a secure life to pursue a dream. People have different responsibilities, resources and limits. My circumstances were my own, and I was fortunate in some ways as well as tested in others.

But I learned that it’s difficult to choose a direction if you haven’t first asked yourself where you actually want to go. If you don’t examine your own wants, familiar expectations can quietly supply them for you. You can spend years working towards a version of success that belongs to somebody else, without ever deciding whether it is the life you would choose.

Knowing what I wanted didn’t give me a guarantee. It gave me a way to judge the next decision. Would this move take me closer to the life I was trying to build? What could I do with the time, money and skills I had? What was one practical step I could take now?

In May 2014, after more than seven years of work, ‘Gleda’ was launched. Later, Gail and I sailed her down the Atlantic coast of Europe and into the Mediterranean. The voyage eventually ended, and I had to sell her. A dream coming true doesn’t mean you get to keep it forever. But building her changed how I saw myself and what I believed I could do.

When I look back, the most important moment wasn’t the day the boat touched the water. It was earlier, when I stopped treating my own desire as something foolish to be postponed, and began to take it seriously enough to act on it.

You don’t need to want a boat. You may not want to change your life at all. But it may be worth asking: What do I want, if I set aside for a moment what I’m supposed to want? The answer doesn’t have to be grand or dramatic. It only has to be yours.

You can’t choose a direction until you know what you’re moving towards. And you may not know for certain what lies ahead. I didn’t. I only knew that building ‘Gleda’ was the first thing in a long time that felt like my choice.

Poetry isn’t really my thing, but this one speaks to me.

I know not why I yearn for thee again, To sail once more upon thy fickle flood; I’ll hear thy waves wash under my death-bed, Thy salt is lodged forever in my blood.

Yet I have seen thee lash the vessel’s sides In fury, with thy many tailed whip; And I have seen thee, too, like Galilee, When Jesus walked in peace to Simon’s ship.

And I have seen thy gentle breeze as soft As summer’s when it makes the cornfields run; And I have seen thy rude and lusty gale Make ships show half their bellies to the sun.

Thou knowest the way to tame the wildest life. Thou knowest the way to bend the great and proud: I think of that Armada whose puffed sails, Greedy and large, came swallowing every cloud.

But I have seen the sea-boy, young and drowned, Lying on shore and by thy cruel hand, A seaweed beard was on his tender chin, His heaven-blue eyes were filled with common sand.

And yet, for all, I yearn for thee again, To sail once more upon thy fickle flood: I’ll hear thy waves wash under my death-bed, Thy salt is lodged forever in my blood.

In the Navy part of my job was to pack parachutes, and one of them was used for real.

It was fitted to the pilot ejector seat of an 892 Naval Air Squadron Phantom. The aircraft suffered a catastrophic birdstrike just after take off, and both crew had to ‘bang out’.

Afterwards, the chutes were returned to our section.

Every chute had a servicing record card, and the last name on one of the cards was mine.

I think about that card now and again. Nobody stood over me while I packed that parachute. Nothing told me, at the time, that this one would matter more than the others on the bench. There was just the job, done properly or not, and a signature at the end of it.

The easy kind of attention

When people talk about attention they usually mean concentration, and focus comes easy when the stakes are high. I never had to talk myself into paying attention to a parachute. The whole job was built so that you couldn’t do otherwise. There was a procedure to follow, a card to fill in, a name to put on it, and somebody who would one day ask what you had done. Somewhere out there was a person who would trust that canopy with their life, whether or not they ever knew my name.

That’s attention with the choice taken out of your hands. It was still a choice, of course, but the circumstances made it for me, so it felt like part of the work and not a decision.

The hard kind

The harder kind is the everyday sort, where nothing is at stake, nobody is checking and there is no card to sign.

William James, the father of modern psychology, put it plainly in 1890: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Think about how much that says. Whatever you notice becomes your life. Whatever you don’t notice, in effect, never happened. And because attention is limited, every time you agree to look at one thing you agree not to look at something else.

Anyone who has stood a watch knows how this works in practice. The rules of the sea require a proper lookout at all times, and the lookout rarely slips in a gale. It slips on a fine, quiet afternoon when nothing’s happening and the mind wanders off. The dangerous moments are often the dull ones.

The agreement isn’t free, either. Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, saw this coming in 1971, long before the internet or the smartphone. Information, he pointed out, consumes the attention of whoever receives it, so “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, has spent twenty years measuring what that looks like. In 2004 people stayed on one screen for about two and a half minutes before switching to something else. The most recent figure she reports is around 47 seconds.

I don’t think that’s simply weak will. There are very clever people paid to make looking away from a screen difficult. My generation met technology gently, with an electronic calculator at school, dial-up internet later, and a clumsy home-made blog in 2006, and has watched it become relentless. So if attention is a choice, it’s a choice made against a headwind. I’ve dealt with that partly by taking myself out of some of the places that ask for it. I don’t use social media (except for Bluesky), and my writing lives on my own domain. But a headwind doesn’t abolish the choice. Any sailor will tell you it simply means you have to keep making it, and make it deliberately.

Looking without a reason

So why bother, when there is no card and no stranger in a cockpit?

My answer is a plain one. I try to pay attention, not because I’m looking for anything in particular, but because you never know what you may see.

That’s an odd sort of reasoning, and it doesn’t sit well with most advice on focus, which wants attention aimed at a goal. The French philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1942, called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She also thought it was less a matter of straining than of waiting: staying open enough to take in what is actually in front of you, not what you expected to find. That matches my experience far better than the word “focus” does.

Last week, as I stomped round the field on my 🧠Thinking Walk🚶🏻‍♂️, I spotted a funky lime green caterpillar See it here

If I’d not had my eyes open, if I hadn’t been paying attention, I could easily have trodden on it. I wouldn’t even have known it was there. A caterpillar was the last thing I’d have been looking for.

The same card, a different job

Looking back, I don’t think packing parachutes and noticing the ordinary are two different things. A packer’s attention is care for someone you can’t see. The everyday kind is care for a world that can’t thank you or check your work. In both cases, the attention is a gift because it asks nothing back, and in both cases whoever benefits may never know where it came from.

The difference is that the Navy made the choice for me and wrote it down. Everyday life doesn’t. Nobody will check whether I noticed the weather turning, or the person who needed someone to listen properly, or the thing that was right in front of me. There’s no servicing record for any of it.

I’ve come to think that is exactly why it matters. When there is no card, the only signature is your own.

Commitment, coincidence and the unexpected ways life opens up.

I’ve collected quotes for years. Most have disappeared into a digital archive, never to be seen again. But one has stayed with me, because I’ve come to recognise something in it that I’ve experienced in my own life.

It’s from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, written by W. H. Murray, a Scottish mountaineer who understood something about venturing into the unknown.

Here’s the passage that matters to me:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

Murray goes on to describe how commitment sets a stream of events in motion, bringing unforeseen encounters, opportunities and assistance that would never otherwise have come your way.

He concludes:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

You may have come across these words before. They’re often attributed to Goethe, but they come from Murray’s account of an expedition to the Himalayas.

His team faced a catalogue of problems, including a shortage of funds, difficulties obtaining visas and permits, and a lack of equipment. Their plans seemed unlikely to succeed.

They bought their tickets to Bombay anyway.

I’ve returned to that passage many times over the years. Not because I believe in magic, or because I think the universe will deliver whatever I want simply because I ask for it.

It’s because I’ve seen something in Murray’s words play out in my own life.

Three occasions stand out.

In 1983, I arrived in Falmouth aboard Mor Gwas, an 18-foot sailing boat. I had little money, no plan and knew nobody.

I wasn’t following a carefully constructed strategy. I was there because I’d committed myself to a voyage and had set off.

I berthed alongside another boat. Its owner introduced me to Clive, a delivery skipper. That introduction led to paid sailing work, numerous trips and experience I could never have gained by staying where I was. Among other things, I eventually sailed from Falmouth to Tenerife.

Think about that for a moment.

I hadn’t arrived in Falmouth with a network of contacts, a job offer or a plan for building a sailing career. I couldn’t have put any of those things on a list of assets before setting off.

But I’d put myself in a position where the opportunity could arise.

Had I stayed at home, it couldn’t have happened.

Years later, I embarked on a much bigger project: building Gleda, a Wharram Tiki 38 catamaran.

It took eight years of work before she was launched in 2014. During the build, I struggled with hand tools and was often short of money. There were plenty of reasons to doubt whether I’d ever finish her.

Then something unexpected happened.

The owner of the barn where I was building Gleda took on a contract to manufacture horse jumps. He converted the adjoining barn into a fully equipped woodworking workshop.

He offered me free use of it, along with part-time work.

Suddenly, I had access to equipment I couldn’t afford and a way of earning money while continuing with my project.

I hadn’t planned for any of this. I couldn’t have foreseen it, let alone arranged it.

Yet there I was, building a boat that would eventually take Gail and me cruising around the Mediterranean for several years.

The opportunity appeared because I was already committed to doing something that, at times, seemed beyond my means.

More recently, Gail and I had plans to live and travel in a fifth-wheel caravan. COVID-19 and Brexit put an end to them.

We were left wondering where on earth we were going to live.

We had no solution waiting in the wings. No carefully prepared alternative. Just a problem we needed to solve.

Within days, an old park home came onto the market It was located just a few minutes from where we had our caravan. It needed considerable work, but the price was ridiculously low.

Within two weeks, it was ours. We moved in a few months later.

Again, something appeared that we hadn’t known existed when we needed it.

Looking back, I can see a pattern in these three experiences. On each occasion, I’d committed myself to a course of action without knowing how everything would work out. On each occasion, something happened that opened up possibilities I couldn’t have anticipated.

Could I have planned for any of those opportunities? No.

Could they have happened if I’d never put myself in those situations? Almost certainly not.

So, what is Providence?

Murray called it Providence. Others might call it God, fate, luck, coincidence or the Universe. I’m not particularly interested in arguing over the name.

What interests me is the possibility that there’s something important in the relationship between commitment and opportunity.

Before we commit ourselves to something, we tend to assess it using what we already know. We calculate the cost, identify the obstacles and consider the risks.

That’s sensible enough, up to a point.

But we can only make those calculations using the information available to us now. We can’t account for people we haven’t met, opportunities that haven’t appeared or solutions we haven’t yet discovered.

If we insist on knowing how everything will work out before we begin, we may never begin at all.

And that creates a curious problem. By refusing to act until success looks reasonably certain, we may prevent the very events that could make success possible.

Commitment changes our position. We start doing things, meet people, acquire skills and encounter situations that would otherwise remain outside our experience. Sometimes, those encounters lead somewhere unexpected.

Perhaps that’s all Providence is. Or perhaps there’s more to it. I don’t pretend to know.

But I do know that, looking back over my life, some of the most significant opportunities came about in ways I couldn’t have predicted. They weren’t the result of following a reliable plan. They emerged along the way.

That doesn’t mean we should abandon common sense, ignore risks or leap blindly into situations we can’t afford to survive. Nor does commitment guarantee a happy ending. Things can go wrong, and sometimes they do.

But there’s a difference between recognising genuine danger and assuming something is impossible simply because we can’t yet see how to make it happen.

I wonder how many of us confuse the two.

Perhaps there’s something you’ve wanted to do for years. A project you’ve dismissed because you lack the money, the experience, the contacts or the time. Something you’ve decided is beyond your reach because you can’t see a route from where you are to where you want to be.

I’m not suggesting you throw caution to the wind and trust to blind faith.

I’m suggesting you consider a different possibility.

What if you don’t need to see the whole route before taking the first step?

What if some of the things you need will only become available once you’ve started?

Murray believed that when we commit ourselves, Providence moves too. I can’t prove that he’s right. But I’ve experienced enough to take his words seriously.

And perhaps that’s the point.

You don’t have to believe me. You don’t even have to believe in Providence.

Just leave open the possibility that what looks impossible from where you’re standing today might not look quite so impossible once you’ve begun.

You might be surprised by what happens next.

At eleven, I sat an exam that sorted me into a higher academic tier. The system decided I was bound for university and a professional career: middle class, white collar, a head start.

It didn’t work out that way. Harsh discipline and learning by rote were still considered legitimate teaching methods, and their sole purpose was to get children through exams. Failure was never the school’s fault. It was a personal, moral, intellectual defect in the child.

I was labelled lazy. I was punished physically. I didn’t rebel. I switched off, and escaped as soon as I legally could.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that my view of academic and, to some extent, vocational qualifications is dim, or that I find the idea of needing ‘permission’ before you can operate in any given sphere anathema.

(I do, of course, make an exception for any profession involving the lives and well-being of others. I no more want a self-taught surgeon poking around inside me than you do.)

But I believe we each have the freedom to pursue our interests without first gaining ‘official’ approval. My experiences at school led me to that belief, and I’m grateful. Had I been the academic success they expected, my working life would have been far less varied and interesting.

I hesitate here. I have a strong aversion to blowing my own trumpet. But I’ve stated a belief, and I need to show it was shaped by experience. So here are some of the things I’ve done without any qualifications:

Worked as a motor mechanic.

Helped develop National Standards for the Flooring Industry.

Wrote and published three books.

Built an ocean-going catamaran.

That last one is the source of my greatest pride.

The idea of building a 38ft sailing catamaran, designed to cross oceans, by myself, in a leaky cold barn in the middle of England, seemed ludicrous to everyone I mentioned it to. To be honest, there were times it seemed ludicrous to me too.

I’d never built a boat. I’d never used epoxy resin. I’d never laminated fibreglass.

It took 5,000 hours over seven and a half years. For the first four of those years I worked on her in the evenings and at weekends, after eight to ten-hour days in a tough job. Every spare penny I had went into the build.

Mistakes were made, of course they were. I don’t know if you’ve ever put too much hardener into a plastic pot of epoxy resin. Perhaps my old chemistry teacher taught us about exothermic reactions, I probably wasn’t paying attention. Let’s just say that a plastic pot bursting into flames in one’s hand tends to engrain itself on ones memory.

But you don’t know what skills or knowledge you need until you’re building for real.

Seven and a half years after starting, my catamaran went into the water. She floated.

We sailed her from Falmouth to the Mediterranean. She’s now in Indonesia, having crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

If you’d told me that on the cold, dark December night in 2006 when I cut the first bits of plywood, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I wasn’t building her to prove anything to anyone.

I was doing it for myself.

This morning, we drove from our home on the south coast of Cornwall to St Agnes, a village on the north coast of Cornwall. That it’s only a 9 mile trip explains why we get storm-blown salt on the windows whichever way the wind blows.

St Agnes and its surrounding coastline are part of the UNESCO Mining Heritage Site and was famously said to have some of the best tin in the world during its mining boom in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It’s home to a wonderful little museum we’ve wanted to visit for a while.

Unsurprisingly, mining exhibits take centre stage, but of course, ships and the sea feature also.

I was particularly taken with the story of the ‘Lady Agnes’ and her figurehead.

‘Lady Agnes’ was a 79ft topsail schooner built in 9-months during 1877. They had to work quickly because, amazingly, she was built on the beach in Trevaunance Cove just below St Agnes. Totally exposed to northerly winter storms, any delay would have been disastrous.

The vessel worked under sail for nearly 60 years before ending her days as a hulk in Portmadog South Wales. Amongst other things, she transported slate to the Mediterranean and bought salt cod from Newfoundland to Portugal.

Her fascinating story made buying a book about her from the museum gift shop a temptation I couldn’t resist.

My first leaf through its pages led me to the voyages she made in 1881. She sailed from Falmouth in May of that year and arrived in Cartagena (Spain) later that same month. She then made two trips between Newfoundland and Portugal before arriving back in Plymouth that December.

Falmouth and Cartagena are the two ports closest to my heart.

I’m looking forward to spending some time with Lady Agnes.

Most of us build online on land we rent. Here’s what that cost me, and how I moved.

For the eight years I was building my boat, I ran a WordPress blog, The Gleda Project. Tens of thousands of words, hundreds of photos, written most days. I gathered a little community there and made friends.

Then Gleda was finally launched, and I found out I couldn’t take any of it with me.

I picked out some highlights by hand. I made a note of some email addresses. What’s left is a few pages on the Wayback Machine.

Some more tech-savvy readers will question that. There were, and are, ways to export everything out of WordPress they’ll say. I know. Perhaps, with the time and the know-how, it might have been possible. For me, it would never have been easy. Keeping the site up was an option, but self-hosted WordPress is notoriously demanding: constant site and plugin updates, constant battles with hacking and spam. Add the cost of keeping the domain name, and that tipped the balance. I took it on the chin and moved on.

But it’s easy to get sucked in, isn’t it? The people behind these platforms are expert marketers. “Come and use our tool. It’s free. It’s brilliant.” And once you’ve put years into a place, leaving gets harder every month. That’s the sunk cost fallacy, and I’d fallen for it without noticing.

I called this “land we rent” in the subtitle, and I mean it literally. Renting means someone else makes the rules, and can change them. Someone else has the control. Someone else can pull the plug whenever they like. Rent space from Substack, Medium or Beehiiv, and you’ve set up shop under someone else’s roof. Build a subscriber list there, or start earning, and the cost of leaving goes up again.

It’s a lesson I should already have learned. But in 2024, I set out to earn a few pennies on Medium. I posted regularly behind the paywall and built a following of 1.4K. In April that year I earned $321.26. Happy days I thought. Finally, I’d cracked it.

Five months later my monthly earnings were $52.17, and they kept dropping into single figures. Medium had changed the Partner Program rules. I stopped writing there not long after.

There’s no point harping on. There are plenty of places up for rent, and you make your own choice.

But so far, I’ve ignored the place where renting has the biggest sunk cost of all: social media.

I’ve stayed away from it. My feelings about Meta and X make that easy. The only place you’ll find me is Bluesky, and I’ll come back to that in a minute.

I know many people have years of their lives on these platforms: their photos, their memories, their friends. Some of them allow you to download an archive. But it’s a bunch of files you can’t really use anywhere else.

It may be that you’re already too far down the road to say goodbye. You may think you’re getting a fair deal. That’s fine, and I’m pleased for you.

But if you find yourself on a signup page, eager to start writing to the world, here are the things I check first now:

Can I get what’s mine out again?

Can I get it in a format I can use somewhere else? (I think Markdown files are best.)

Can I keep it running without it becoming a second job?

If the answer to any of those is no, I’d look elsewhere.

Recently, I chose micro.blog as my home online. It gives me a permanent home on the internet that I fully own and control. The words, photos and links I create there belong entirely to me. Best of all, because I can use my own website address (neilhawkesford.co.uk), I’m never locked in. If I ever decide to leave, I can instantly pack up all my content and my web address and move elsewhere without losing my audience or breaking my links.

Micro.blog can cross-post to Bluesky. In other words, every post you see there goes up on my own site first. The original lives under my own roof, and Bluesky just gets a copy. It’s a doorway to my site, not somewhere I live.

I also cross-post to Medium, and the same applies. They just get a copy. I only do it because I still have an audience there, and it’s an easy way to get more eyes onto my work. No more paywall, though. Every post is free, and every post ends with a sign-off inviting people to join my mailing list, the one that’s all mine.

Building on rented land has cost me a lot of time and effort over the years.

But no more. This time, when the winds change, I’ll be taking it with me.