“Blog my Butt Off” Conclusions

“Blog my Butt Off” Conclusions

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:

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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!

4 Comments

  1. Fred Schechter 11 years ago

    As usual, great stuff Dave!

  2. Ashley P 11 years ago

    Great post, I definitely agree that sometimes you just need to write whatever comes to mind.

  3. Great post Dave. I’m spending an entire week focusing on productivity, and your conclusions here are fascinating.

    Surely this exercise vindicates your quests for productivity, showing that as soon as you dedicated yourself to be more productive as a blogger, you relaxed and the creative instincts and brain’s capacity to draw lateral conclusions kicked in.

    Proving, once again, that productivity is the engine behind creativity. Make it happen, then worry if it’s any good afterwards!

  4. Matthew Bauman 11 years ago

    Which post surprised your the most? Which did you enjoy writing the most?