Published counts for three consecutive months: 9, then 2, then 1.
For a while I read that as motivation decaying. The usual story. Enthusiasm at the start, life gets busy, the habit dies. The implied fix is to try harder, or to set a schedule, or to feel worse about it.
I think that reading is wrong, and the shape of the curve is the evidence.
A discipline problem is noisy. Some weeks you publish, some weeks you do not, and the average sags around a middle. What I have instead is a clean decay with the first month sitting at the top. If willpower were the constraint, month 1 would not be the month I produced 9 of them.
What actually changed between month 1 and month 3 is that the cost per piece went up. Each new guide inherited the previous guide’s markup, which had itself accumulated whatever the guide before it needed. By the third month a new piece meant a new stylesheet, a new set of one-off class names, and a layout decision for every section. The writing was the cheap part.
So the number to track is how long it takes to publish one, rather than how many got published. When the first climbs the second falls, and scheduling does nothing about it.
This is the reason the rebuild has a notes tier at all. Notes are 150 to 400 words with 3 required frontmatter fields and no layout decisions. If publishing a note ever costs more than writing one, the tier has failed and the curve comes back.
In 3 months the only question worth asking is whether the count went up.