About three weeks ago I tweeted that I was going to “blog my butt off”, the idea being that I wanted to see what would happen if I posted stuff without worrying about how it fit with my website’s “theme”. I had been feeling bottled-up for quite a long time, and wanted to see if I could get back to care-free posting.

Over the past 21 days-or-so, I wrote the following posts:

• The Necessity of Daily Conversation – I realized that I was bottlenecked on having conversations with people! Hence, the desire to blog my butt off to see if that could kickstart something.

• Zing Maker 1: Moving Past Uncertainty and Zing Maker II: Appreciating Small Steps – A look at my periods of low energy, and the hypothetical existence of a magical substance called “Zing”.

• Separate Twitter for Blog Post Notification – I added a new twitter account just for blog post updates, so I didn’t have to clutter up my personal twitter.

• Blog My Butt Off! – With the surge in blogging now actively clogging newsreaders, I figured I should explain what’s going on.

• Dave Caolo and His Clipboard of Productivity Forms – This was a link I saw coming in that talked about two of my forms, and Dave Caolo is an interesting guy, so up it goes!

• The Dave Seah Shop is Now Open – The culmination of many months, even YEARS, trying to make an attractive pay-as-you-go automated order-taking and fulfillment system that didn’t require a lot of hand-holding from me.

• Design Challenge: Child-friendly Parental Scheduling – A reader asks a question, and I pose it publicly to gain more insight into the personal scheduling needs of children.

• Adventure Thinking and Procrastination – As with modern love and film, I have the suspicion that the expertly-edited cinematic version of my imagined future has been skewed toward unrealistic expectations of productivity.

• Creative Process Q&A on Creative Huddle – One of my past collaborators asks me some questions about creative process.

• Preliminary Lessons: Blogging my Butt Off – The big insight is that my “content strategy” isn’t to dominate a niche, but to be an accessible participant in a circle of friends with shared interests, values, and experiences.

• Visual DNA Personality Test – Saw this on Facebook thought it was cool!

• Interfaces – An experimental piece describing how I like to view the world, and what parts of it in particular attract me.

• Video Games I’m Playing: Firefall – Friends who play video games talk about the video games they play with their friends. You can’t stop them. Sorry.

• 16 Weeks of GOing to the Gym for 15 Minutes at a Time – A report on whether the 15-minute workout actually did anything.

• Me? AD/HD? – A reader contacts me privately and asks if I’d looked into AD/HD as a possible contributor to my feeling of frustration regarding my goals. With permission, I open up the subject for discussion with readers, resulting in a lot of interesting commentary.

• People, After All – A personal diary piece about how people matter more to me than I had thought.

• Douglas Eby: Shy or Introverted of Highly Sensitive? – While researching AD/HD on the Internet, I came across this collection of notes of similar symptom sets. Some I’d heard about, but others were new to me; the thought that “I’m probably OK” settles over me as a result.

• Got a New Kitchen Timer – My old OXO died. Search for a newer, better timer leads to a new one from American Innovation.

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p>This didn’t seem like a lot of blog posts to me, and there was a week where I was too busy with client work to devote time to writing. However, just thinking about what to talk about and share on the blog has shifted my view of what I do for a living:

I make stuff and write about the experience in the context of a being a self-sufficient entrepreneur seeking collaborators in creative independence.

That’s what I do, and it is actually a full-time job. Up to now, I thought it was a temporary placeholder description, and this bothered me a lot. It was actually the days when I was too busy to take a chunk of time to gather my time that reframed my view of what I do. “I’m too busy to blog!” meant that I actually had a lot going on, and the kinds of things I’ve been doing are all oriented toward improving my business operation, creative skillset, and collaborating with people to make things happen. I’m in a place where I have the opportunity to make things happen. I’m right in the pocket of productivity, ready to roll!

I felt very good about this. As frustrated as I’d been about lack of progress, I’m started to believe more and more that such endeavors just takes effort applied over a big chunk of time. And with that belief, I’ve started to unclench my creative muscles and discover the joy of making anything, which replaces the previous stress of meeting high expectations. I still have the high expectations, but now I am more comfortable just seeing what happens than worrying about missing the mark on first throw.

So that’s what my takeaway is from writing and posting a lot. I’m among friends here; you would HAVE to be a friend if you are putting up with these long blog posts, after all :-)

That said, there is a different audience for concise information, and I’ve started to build a separate blog for that under the title “creative independence”. We shall see where it goes!