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blogging

Making blogging easier: a note to self

February 1, 2014

CBD courtyard

One of my goals this year is to tend this blog and post more regularly. It’s a great love and so important and rejuvenating for me to write and create here. But it gets squeezed out with work, with other life and people priorities and currently, with the joys of renovating!

So I am looking to see how I can make blogging easier and how I can make it less onerous to be here writing, creating, connecting and communicating. What’s the secret?

I’ve been scouting the net for clues and found some great posts full of ideas. I’ve also revisited my own thoughts on this issue.

Some sites that have provided valuable tips:

100 tips and tricks professionals use to make blogging easier

5 tips to make blogging easier

5 techniques and 10 tools for making blogging easier

My post on this previously:

Shorter posts, smaller steps

These sites reinforce that blogging is hard work but that the job can be made easier.

Here is some distilled wisdom from these instructive posts, the strategies of other bloggers I admire and my own experiences:

1. Get organised with your time

Make time to blog and schedule time for planning and writing even if it’s just short grabs of time:

Treat your blogging like a friend. Schedule a regular amount of time where you can completely focus on your blog. It might  be 30 mins every Tuesday lunchtime or an hour every second Thursday at 9pm.

from: 5 tips to make blogging easier

Part of this is planning your blog posts and scheduling your time. See Charlie Gilkey’s ‘Productive Flourishing’ for some useful blog planner and calendar tools with tips on how to use them.

2. Collect your thoughts

Make sure you capture those fleeting thoughts that might result in a blog post. Brainstorm, mind map, make notes – find ways to capture those treasures on paper or digitally. It’s amazing how you think will remember something later but you often can’t. The random notes and clipped articles can be a rich source of ideas but you have to catch them and collect them like a bower bird.

A tip from 5 techniques and 10 tools for making blogging easier:

When capturing ideas for a post try to write more than just the title. Also write down the key points of the post. This will make life easier when writing later.

And here’s a really useful post from ‘The Mojo Lab’ on capturing creative ideas.

3. Be organised with the equipment and inputs

Try to be as organised as you can with the inputs: possible imagery, links, quotes, clippings and with the equipment: your computer, printer, browser and apps. It’s amazing how a fabulous idea can become a nightmare time-wise as you try to gather your resources. Some things are beyond our control but being organised with all the supporting technologies and resources can make the process so much easier when the times comes to write.

I find evernote the best for clipping articles, tagging them and making notes. I love feedly for managing online reading and keeping track of favourite posts and bloggers.

See ‘The Mojo Lab’ again for a great toolkit post and tips on all sorts of useful creative inputs and technologies.

4. Don’t make the task bigger than it can be

Yes, this post is getting long! But you don’t always have to write the long, well-researched, extensively redrafted blog piece – though these are important. Don’t defeat yourself mentally before you start. And don’t get hung up on having to write ‘x’ number of words.

In tip 89 of 100 tips and tricks professionals use to make blogging easier we are reminded to:

Chill out about length.

People are always in a tizzy about how long posts should be. It really doesn’t matter. Keep writing til you’re done.

5. Mix it up

Find different ways to blog: quotes, images, photo essays, short pieces, lists, poems, links to what you have discovered or enjoyed. Your blog posts don’t always have to feature lots of words. This is not to under-estimate the time investment and creativity of primarily visual posts or posts that share valued reads on the net – they all take time and care. But just to encourage an attitude of mixing it up so it’s not always writing time intensive pieces that require a lot of research, drafting and editing.

Some of my favourites:

Olivia White’s Sunday Reflections

Susannah Conway’s annual break from writing-focused pieces: The August Break

Tammy Strobel’s beautiful photo essays

6. Be more spontaneous

Try to write from the heart more without feeling that every piece has to be referenced, reworked and crafted over time. Try to learn to write and blog anywhere, not just at your special spot at home.

I am loving Ellen Nightingale’s Choose your own Journey for posts that have a spontaneous feel – coming from the flow of her days and thoughts as a creative working mother.

And I highly recommend Susannah Conway’s Blogging from the Heart e-course for learning about this special skill and art from one who has led and modelled its development, especially in terms of the emotional courage required.

7. Just do it…blog more often

And finally in a somewhat counter-intuitive approach to making blogging easier, Gretchen Rubin suggests do it every day and put yourself in ‘creativity boot camp‘:

Whenever anyone asks me for advice about how to keep up with writing for a blog, I always say: “Post every day.” Although this sounds arduous, many people find, as I do, that weirdly it’s easier to write every day than just a few times a week.

This is sound advice – I can see that the things that slow me down are because of the spaces in between. I am just not organised and it’s like starting over again each time. By being more engaged with blogging on a regular basis, it’s easier to pick up the pieces of all the tips above: capturing ideas, mixing it up, ensuring my systems and processes are up to speed, finding resources and being spontaneous.

I know some of my blogging buddies are working on this right now with Ellen Nightingale working on a 30 day challenge for her blog. And I am so loving the work that she is producing! I’m sure it’s not easy with all that she is juggling but Ellen’s blog is a great example of how engaging in a ‘boot camp’, committed way can result in beautiful outcomes.

So tell me, what makes blogging easier for you?

Would love to hear your tips and experiences! And I have to say this post took the longest time to write, managed to break all its own advice and everything went wrong whilst writing it including a glass shower screen shattering into a million pieces over my head today ( cf the joys of renovating above!) – so yes, a note to self if ever there was one. Would love to hear your thoughts to fuel my journey! Clearly there’s a long way to go!

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creativity introversion

Gems #19 Valuing a quieter way

October 31, 2012

I’m reading ‘Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking‘ by Susan Cain and (quietly) cheering and affirming what I’m reading on every page. It’s so wonderful to feel validated as a more reflective person and leader and to understand how this mode of being has become undervalued in our current times. It’s also helped me understand why social media works for me as a form of communication and self-expression.

You can learn more about the book and related thoughts at Susan’s website, The Power of Introverts. I especially recommend Susan’s ‘Manifesto‘ as an introduction to her perspectives on ways of valuing a quieter approach to life. My favourite is No 9:

Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.

The whole list is going to sit beside me at work in a prominent place for me to keep going back to and to discuss with others.

You can also dive into this great piece on ‘Brain-pickings’ which provides a link to an illustrated introduction to Susan’s work as well as her recent TED talk on the power of introverts.

A couple of other recent gems by my blogging buddy, Victoria Smith, at Corbae Cafe also emphasise the value of a quieter, more focused and selective approach to life.

In ‘Burned out on social media: pick a smaller pond‘, Victoria discusses how overwhelming and time-wasting social media can become and suggests we reconsider where, how and why we want to be connected.

In a review of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s new book, ‘The Impact Equation: Are you making things happen or just making noise‘, Victoria highlights the value of this book to help us define our online platform and presence so that we can rise above the noise.

And finally, a TEC Canada piece, ‘Quiet Innovation: How rethinking the way your company works can create a culture of innovative thought‘, focuses on one of my favorite topics in the work context: fostering creativity and innovation. Tips include: embracing all personality types (including introverts); re-imagining your workspace; and rethinking your definitions of work.

How are you valuing a quieter way?

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blogging work life

Blogging and work

October 21, 2012

There’s a bit of a brick wall between this blog and my work role and working life; maybe not so hard as brick, but a deliberate separation. Because I’m in a leadership role in a public sector organisation with a social media policy, it’s important that I keep a clear space around this blog about my creative self and my life other than work.

I don’t talk about work or my work role, except obliquely and generally in terms of how creative strategies for life may apply to work contexts and vice versa. Some work colleagues know about my blog and keep an eye on it; I blog under my full name so it’s not secret; it’s just not so connected, sort of like two parallel lives.

But of course, in practice it’s not quite that straightforward. It was interesting when things started overlapping more than usual recently when I started a new temporary work role in a different location. Once this new work role was announced, I noticed a sudden surge in my blog stats and people coming to the blog via searching for my name. People were trying to find out about me: just who was this person who was coming to lead them?

As I moved around to meet people in my temporary job role, a number of them said to me, “I love your blog!”. They were tentative and respectful, aware of some of the silent boundaries between the work role and the rest of life, but knowing that I was blogging publicly and out there for all to see. They mentioned my creativity, and how pleased they were to see that I had another life other than work. We discussed the links between creativity and leadership and the value of thinking in this way outside the work role. They loved the links in my blog posts and were interested to see what I was engaging with.

They didn’t:

  • express horror that I had a creative life other than work
  • focus on any negative aspects or details of my writing
  • pick holes, find fault, wish for more or otherwise find me wanting

They just engaged with my blog as intended as a space where I am out in the world, alongside my work role, complementary, mutually inspiring and whole.

This made me reflect on many aspects of where work and my creative self coincide, overlap and mutually benefit each other, and where there is further potential for this. It made me think also about whether these aspects are too separate and need to come together more. Some other bloggers have been thinking about this also.

In ‘Personal Blogging at Work Increases Productivity’, a recent article in Forbes.com, Susan Adams discusses the link between personal blogging and the workplace. She reports on a new academic study that shows that:

Along with sharing information about work tasks, blogging at work pulls employees closer to one another, builds relationships, and over time, increases productivity.

The study looked at people blogging in work contexts and found that blogging also about leisure interests and other more personal aspects of life increased engagement and then translated into real life connection. Adams notes that:

We’re seeing more data that shows what we already know in our hearts: when we connect with people beyond work, we work together more productively.

For me, it’s also about bringing your whole self to work rather than leaving key parts of yourself, especially the ones that are your own personal drivers, at the door when you arrive.

On a related theme of the work and personal coming together in the physical workspace, Victoria Smith in a recent post on ‘Beautility: Making the Useful Beautiful for a Magical Work Space‘, highlights the concept of how we can ‘beautilify’ our workspaces and work tools, to make them both practical and a reflection of ourselves:

Most of us spend about half of our waking hours at work and our surroundings have a huge impact on our happiness, creativity, ability to focus, and even our interactions with others…..There’s simply too much evidence about the increase in productivity when our work environments are more pleasing to the eye and reflect us as individuals for companies to ignore the benefits.

Victoria has many practical suggestions for bringing the two together that have certainly made me reflect about my own workspace and how I reflect my creativity and personality there (or not!).

On the broader issue of creativity and work, in a recent Huffington Post piece, ‘100 Reasons Why You Don’t Get Your Best Ideas at Work’, Mitch Ditkoff suggests that the barriers we create with our thinking about the two polarities may well be the answer to where the real issues lie.

So perhaps there is less of a need for a wall between this blog, my creativity and the job role, apart from the caveats of social media policy, and that the interplay between them may result in more productivity and creative ideas in both spaces.

Interested in your thoughts on blogging and work and the interplay between!

Excellent photo taken in Singapore by my daughter, Caitlin

2 Comments
creativity

On Creativity

August 23, 2012

Some gems about gathering creative ideas and being productive:

In ‘Capturing Your Creative Ideas‘, Victoria Smith outlines a range of strategies, both digital and non-digital, for capturing and organising creative ideas. As ‘ideas and creative inspirations are our currency’, Victoria provides many practical suggestions for how to collect and curate our inputs and thoughts so we are ready to move when the opportunity arises.

In ‘Writers, Inspiration and the Ideas we Collect‘, Benison O’Reilly writes about my favourite bird, the satin bowerbird, and the male bowerbird’s penchant for gathering blue objects into his bower to attract his female mate. Benison captures how, like the bowerbird, writers gather what attracts them and the ideas that come together. As Benison says, ‘All writers need to be bowerbirds’, open, alert, looking for what connects us and making the links.

In ‘Creating Perfect Solitude for Creative Focus‘, Leo Babauta provides suggestions for how to find the right time to create, how to schedule it, clear the desk, disconnect and generally keep the creative environment simple and productive.

What gems do you have on creativity?

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planning & productivity

Gems #15 Travelling Light

August 5, 2012

I’m reconnecting with my ‘Gems’ series with this post and I hope it becomes more than an occasional feature now as I settle back into more regular blogging.

Like many bloggers, I find it valuable to gather together and share inspiring links, visuals and reads. These are also some of my most enjoyable blog reads of the week as I see what others have discovered and are reading, and wander off into cyberspace following their tracks.

Some of my favourite inspirations are:

Corbae Cafe’s ‘This Week’s Enthusiasms’

Susannah Conway’s ‘Something for the weekend’

Tammy Strobel’s ‘Inspiring Links’

Most of the weekly round-ups I read tend to be whatever is inspiring or of interest; everyone has their unique flavour which I love. My ‘Gems’ have evolved to focus on a theme. I tend to find themes popping up and collecting together as I read the net and elsewhere through the week. My associative mind tends to group them and make connections and I have found this a useful way to write about them, bringing different threads together.

Here is a round-up of the previous ‘Gems’ posts and their focus:

Gems #14 Writing Poetry

Gems #13 Time to write

Gems #12 Planning and productivity

Gems #11 Managing complexity

Gems #10 On Creativity

Gems #9  Shining light on yourself

Gems #8 Blogging

Gems #7 On creativity and solitude

Gems #6 Encouragement, kindness and resilience

Gems #5 Facts, inspiration and story

Gems #4 Putting yourself out there

Gems #3 Untitled – the earlier ones are a bit less connected; this post features Chris Guillebeau’s great ‘Free Advice’ post, self-publishing and memoir writing

Gems #2 Untitled as above – Susannah Conway’s book announcement and Stephen Cummings’ lyric

Gems #1 Reading notes

The theme surrounding me at present is ‘Travelling Light’. This is about having less belongings, less clutter and moving about with less stuff generally in the world. It’s also about travelling a little lighter here in ‘Transcending’ from time to time and not feeling like every post has to be huge, crafted and heavy. There’s an opportunity to free things up with more visuals, less words, less structure and interspersing the more fully developed posts with lighter ones.

The reading that has influenced my thinking most this week has been ‘Go Small, Be Happy‘ by Tammy Strobel in the Huffington Post. This is such a beautifully written piece; as Victoria Smith says, Tammy’s ‘clear, clean writing is always such a breath of fresh air.’ Documenting the journey on simplifying her life, living in a mobile home, getting rid of many belongings and reducing debt, Tammy shows how all this change over time has made her more flexible, happy and able to focus more on the people in her life.

Susannah Conway has also written about the experiences of travelling light on her recent book tour in ‘ The carry-on experiment’, Susannah shares her experiences of the freedom of moving around more lightly and efficiently in her travels as well as some of the practicalities of this. Others also writing about lighter packing this week include Leo and Eva Babauta at zenhabits in16 essential trips for travelling with a family and Eva’s list: Travelling light for women.

I’m about to enter a period with a fair amount of travel and  moving around for work so will be reading more closely to see if I can make this time less hassled and more productive and streamlined. I have a lot to learn, I can tell you! Light packing is not a current strong point of mine.

Finally, I am thinking about how I can travel lighter here in my blogging. My tendency is towards intensive, crafted posts that are focused on my main love of writing. I will still keep the writing focus, but also keen to see how I can mix this up with lighter, more visual posts. I’ve signed up for ‘The August Break 2012‘ to help me do this. Fortunately as with all of Susannah Conway’s creative ventures, there are few or no rules, but a cleverly constructed framework for engagement with visuals and other creative people, seeing how this can give you inspiration as well as a lighter touch in the blogging world.

I’m looking forward to this as an opportunity to reduce my reliance on the written word, develop the visual side of ‘Transcending’ and also reconnect with my love of photography. I’ll be out and about a bit more, so a good time to be seeing new things and documenting them in different ways. It will still probably be mostly iphone and instagram pics but I’ve  also charged up the Nikon battery and plan to read about polaroids as well through Susannah’s ‘Instant Love‘. So all in all, a perfect time to travel with the light of photography here.

So this week’s thoughts are all about rethinking attachment to belongings, how much I need to carry with me and how I can move more lightly about the world and here in my blog space.

How are you travelling, or seeking to travel, light?

2 Comments
blogging creativity writing

Silences

January 29, 2012

It’s been a long time since I wrote here. I reached a 12 month milestone, celebrated it and then not long after, for some reason I cannot fathom, stopped cold dead, suddenly and completely silent.

What happened? Work took over my life in the main; a very busy and demanding work role, things to solve that could not be satiated, consuming the creative part of me. At night and on weekends, there was little left. It was definitely hard to create in this space. Some poor life choices too, like too much television, but sometimes it was all I could do. The reading, writing part of me I treasure so much languished sadly in this interchange.

This blog as for many, is a tool to keep me writing. In the post celebrating the first anniversary of ‘Transcending’, I spoke about my sense of achievement in keeping at it, ‘writing, researching, tuning in and reading others’, the value of writing, the process and the product. When I look back and read that post, it celebrates so much that is central to me, then comes to that screaming halt, one more post later and 180 days ago.

So time to transcend the silence, move on. It will take some doing; the work role remains insistent. I’ve reached for Tillie Olsen’s ‘Silences’ to help interpret it all. But in the end,  I can spend more time analysing the politics of it, reading about it, trying to understand the reasons for stalling but maybe it is best just to accept it happened for circumstantial reasons and move beyond.

As Anne Lamott exorts us in her article, ‘Time Lost and Found‘, it is really most likely to be an issue of choices, priorities and time management.

I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.

I’m reading Kate Grenville’s ‘Searching for the Secret River‘ and am reminded through that journey of Kate’s writing experiences of the need for stealth and commitment.  Kate uses a whole arsenal of mantras to keep herself writing: ‘never have a blank page,’ ‘don’t wait for the mood’, ‘fix it up later’ and ‘don’t wait for time to write’. She further writes:

I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me – one of my favourite scenes in ‘Joan Makes History‘ was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add to something. (p145)

It really is so important, as Chris Guillebeau reminds us, to start with what you have, not wait for more and generally just to keep moving. So I begin again here and elsewhere, in slivers of words, in slivers of time, to counteract the silence of the blank page, moving on.

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