Reflecting on my first month of daily blogging

First month retrospective.

The gist of how it's going

I feel both spent and good about this project.

In this time and situation of taking care of my family as my main gig while working toward professional goals as a side gig is a lot, but feels better than putting off this writing practice and creative product development.

There's always a good reason to not write. But if I open up to it and allow it, my better reason wins out. I do this because I want to and it feels good at least more than it feels not-good. Facing, processing, and working around negative creative self talk isn't something I'd recommend for the pure pleasure. It's more a necessity of accepting my quirks while working to get the creative results I want.

What follows is a brief retrospective. A short self interview where I ask what's working, what's not working, and what in particular am I feeling grateful about or would like to high-five in thanks.

What works with posting daily?

Talking about projects I've not shared much about. Telling more of the story.

Practicing in public while developing ideas for workshops and books.

Practicing rapid article banner creation with tools and approaches I've crafted.

My web traffic is increasing, the numbers started and continue to be low but show growth. Part of the point of posting every day is to see and be seen.

Some types of articles are so much more difficult to craft than others. It's the ones I care the most about. This practice is helping me learn more about my own creative blocks and hang-ups. Why would I say this is in the "working" category? Because I want to get more skillful about creative roadblocks. When to work with them, work around, through, or take a nap instead. Becoming more aware helps change the narrative:

• From this situation: feeling bad about where an article is and stuck I can't make it better or be done with it yet.
• To practicing this situation more: accepting and coming back to keep the process and practice going. I know through time and effort each article will get to a ready-enough-to-share level of done. I can't predict each project's exact future but I can trust a process to get me to a good creative result eventually.

My other projects are helped since I work them in to the narrative of the blogging a few times a month.

What isn't working?

I need to do better time tracking for this project. Which will help my estimation, real data, real results informing my time management for the coming days and months.

My other projects could use the time I'm spending on blogging.

I'd love for more people to read, react, and benefit from the things I'm publishing every day.

I've generated probably too many article ideas. This is not a humble brag. I get too much joy out of the early stages of creative effort which clutters the path for where I need to go next.

Gratitude and High-fives

Thankful that folks read these posts and message me in different places.

Thankful for and appreciate how Kate Shields Stenzinger checks out articles after I post and helped with an editorial review on a few posts while they were still being written.

Thanks to Jerzy Drozd for being encouraging and for the Lean Into Art episode where we discussed in depth the idea of daily publishing.

Onward to a new month of this practice.

Thanks for being here, let's see where this goes next.