It seems ridiculously long since my last blog post. Six whole days. But that’s what happens when you switch from doing a daily blog post to a weekly blog post.

Listen to me. I make it sound like I’d been doing it forever when it was only for thirty days. But I’ve had time to reflect on the lessons learned from that 30 day challenge of doing a blog post a day.

Lesson 1: You need to make a commitment and be committed to that commitment.

I struggled with getting any blog posts done in the first three months of 2019. Heck, I’ve been struggling to get posts done for the last few years. My journal is full of entries like: “Ugh. I should have written a blog post today.” I only wrote one post from January to April even though I had enough ideas to write about. I couldn’t get myself to commit and just do the work. Can you say “Resistance”?

I attempted to do 30 Days of blog posts in April. I didn’t announce it. I just thought I’d try it and only announce it after it was obvious that I was doing it. Unfortunately, I missed a couple of days and gave up. I decided to try again when May started but chose to announce it this time so that I would feel more pressure and commitment to the cause.

Lesson 2: Plan ahead as much as possible.

One of the main reasons the April attempt failed was that I didn’t have a plan. The first few days I’d pick an idea to write about. I had a few ideas squirreled away and I figured that I would come up with more ideas as the month wore on.  But it was hard!  And I’d stress out about what I was going to write.

In April, I read about coming up with a blog calendar. So, I brainstormed enough ideas for the entire month of May and plugged them into a calendar. I looked at that calendar every day, so some of those ideas would have time to percolate before I sat down to write them. Also, I came up with some new ideas during the month, so sometimes I wrote those instead and moved the planned topic to another date.

Lesson 3: Schedule the work.

The best days of blog post writing were when I had enough time to get the post written in the morning before work. There were a few times that I got the post done in the evening but usually I had at least outlined what I wanted to write.

The key was scheduling the blog writing right after my morning routine of SAVERS (silence/meditation, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and scripting/journalling). Usually, I would look at the topic and spitball ideas and then make connections to create an outline. Then I’d write a rough draft and copy it into WordPress and edit it while previewing it.

If I was running late in the morning, I at least had time to do the spitballing and come up with an outline. It really helped.

Putting the lessons to work.

Now, I’m going to implement the lessons learned and be more consistent with my blogging than in previous years.
1. I will write a weekly post for the rest of 2019.
2. I’ve already filled the calendar with post ideas for the next six months.
3. The last thing is the schedule. I will post on Thursdays, which means that I will work on it on Wednesdays.

© 2019 Peter Gruner