There are many benefits of asking people to review your blog posts before publishing them. If you reach the right kind of people, the experience is very rewarding. A lot of times I have ended up having a totally different perspective of the subject after reading a well written review.
Of course this will only make sense if you reach out to the right people. Reviewing blogs takes considerable time if done right. And you have very little to offer to them. So many times people accept a review request but BS it thinking that a good review won't actually make much of a big difference to me. The stakes are just not high for them. But personally for me, a good review is worth gold. It forces me to think. It brings a different perspective on the table (sometimes biased but that's okay).
One more big upside to this is that it forces me to reach out and connect to new people and ask them for their time. It makes me bold. And it makes me think about what I have to offer to the other person. It also breaks my habit of procrastinating to talk to new people.
But the downside of all of this is - It takes time. Time that I already don't have.
It takes time to read and follow a well written review. And in case I get lucky and receive a well drafted and intelligent review then - it takes an awful lot of time to work on making things right.
I still remember when got a fascinating feedback on the way how I have presented some data related to mutual funds market. The reviewer spent some time reading my blog post critically thinking about some of the scenarios possible. It was something I had totally missed. And though I was grateful for the person to help me out with the unique perspective, it took me really long to search the right data to back up my assumptions on the market - only to realize that probably nobody has successfully recorded that in the past, ever. Unfortunately, that post still sits in my drafts to haunt me of the time I wasted on it.
This is the worst that could happen - You spending time writing down the ideas you get - at the speed of light. So its not just the cost of time that you spend writing something down, but also the cost of ideas you are not writing down at the moment (an idea not written is an idea lost, for me). Then spending time finding the right person and asking for their generous help. Spending time reading a great review, and then researching the new approaches. And then falling into the deep well of perfection and never completing it just because it is not perfect.
I have been there a couple of times lately. So I have decided that going forward, for this year, I won't be reaching out to anyone asking to review my blog posts. I hope this will help me reduce the time I spend on a single piece so that I could cover a larger chunk of my thoughts for documentation. I will review how well it works out at the end of 2020 and let everyone know.