So today will be my tenth day in a row of writing a blog post. I am not sure if it is getting easier or harder. I am beginning to develop certain habits and ways of writing. As an example when I start writing I will record the time I start to write at the beginning of the post.
And then I stare at the screen trying to decide what I should write about. I hope that as time goes on I will become one of those highly organised writers. One who has a blogging calendar and knows what they are going to write about at any one moment.
I am not sure that will happen, but I definitely like the idea. I am writing for myself though. I don’t have a real agenda, other than to become a better writer. Maybe I will also develop a relationship with an audience, but that is an after thought.
I am reading a book at the moment. Called Straight-Line Leadership by Dusan Djukich. As the title implies it is about finding the straight lines and following them.
The other day I read a brilliant blog post on developing the habit of speed. Reading that was part of what motivated me to blog in a fast way without worrying too much about editing. The hope is that by writing faster the easier it will become.
I also read a blog post over at copyblogger which talks about how simple writing really is. You just show up and write. It reminds me of the comment I pulled in from Mark Suster in another blog post about how he starts and then he finishes. It’s the person I want to become. I want to stop starting some things and then just dropping them as I decide to move in a different direction.
I want to be the person who shows up, takes the straight line and goes fast.
That said it is hard to know when to stop. In the past, I owned a restaurant. It bled money from day one. Yet I wanted to be the person who started and finished. So I kept on going losing more and more money until I pretty much bankrupted myself. Not a great place to be and in some ways I am not sure whether I ever really recovered.
I then left that and went into another field. One that was perhaps even harder than the restaurant business. After seven years of that, I threw in the towel and moved to Peru.
And I have been here now for seven years. It is easy here, the cost of living is low, so I don’t need to work that hard to live well. But now I feel that I have been coasting.
I am too comfortable so I am casting around for the right thing to do next. I have been doing web development and Social Media Consultancy for companies. But I have been lazy. I have shown up, sure. But then I have procrastinated for hours and hours on the way to actually doing what I should be doing. So I haven’t accomplished nearly what I should have. I look around at friends in similar industries and am in awe.
Still along the way I developed some premium WordPress plugins. Some of them have done okay, but not as well as they should have done.
I haven’t shown up and done it anywhere near as much as I should have done. That has to change. And I can definitely have no more excuses.
It is interesting as I get to the end of writing this 10th post on my blog. Today I have written it in 15 minutes. I haven’t really looked away from the writing screen once other than to check a spelling.
The first blog post in this set of 10 daily blog posts took me about 6 hours from beginning to end. It also I suspect wasn’t that good. I am not sure if this is much better. It did though take less than half an hour including editing. It is worth noting before I get too proud of myself that I wasted about an hour before I started to write.
Still I am getting better.
I need to get better still and remember that there are no more excuses. Perhaps you need to do the same. Thanks for reading. Love to hear your comments below.
Time spent writing: 15 minutes.
Time From Starting Writing to Finishing: 15
Time Editing: 11 minutes
How Happy I am with Result: 6