After yesterday’s post acknowledging that I’ve hit a bad patch for writing, I have come up with three actionable thoughts about how to try to buoy myself. The three thoughts are: 

• Make blogging the first thing I do in the morning
• Make a blogging document that gets me in the right frame of mind
• Recognise journalling is beneficial for the blogging process

Let’s go into a bit more detail about them below.

1. First thought: The first thing I do

I rescheduled this morning’s morning routine so that I write before anything else gets done. It’s a shame because I really wanted to get my kettlebell exercise done, but I can only do one thing at a time, and I need that today to be blogging. How do I know it’s the thing I need to do? Because it’s the most difficult. Maybe on another day that difficult thing will be the exercise, but today it’s not.

I initially wanted to go straight into writing the blog, but I decided to sneak in 10 minutes of journalling beforehand. Why be sneaky? Well, to be honest, those 10 minutes have given me a little bit of a buffer from waking up, and let me write some random shit for myself. Hopefully it also means that random shit doesn’t just end up right here in the blog. 

I guess you could call it a warm up, but also an end in itself, because I really enjoy just writing for myself.

2. Second thought: The document

I feel like this would make Cal Newport proud, given it’s an idea built on his core documents concept. Yesterday I realised that I should set up a ‘blog’ document, where I’d write some notes to myself about blogging that I can self-reference when going through the motions. 

It’s highly personalised and really draft form, but I thought I’d share what I’ve got so far:

• Recognise you don’t like to write at your work desk.
• Recognise you like writing with pen and paper. See how it integrates with digital ideas captured. (Note: I’ve written this one because I like to not spend loads of time on a computer screen given that’s also my day job. However, I’m capturing ideas digitally, so need to work out how it balances with that, and also how to then transcribe the writing onto a laptop. From the first two days it seems like the pen and paper is a good place for a first draft).

• 5 minutes is a blessing. 30 minutes is good.
• A short post of 2 sentences is a blessing. Anything longer is good.
• Boring, rubbish, unoriginal writing is a blessing. Wow, amazing, high/deep thinking, original writing is good.

• Core mission: share my personal experience. Share observation and insight. If one person finds value in anything I say or relates to it, then it’s worth it.

• It’s okay to fuck up, no one else cares anyway about what you’re doing
• Get chatgpt to review if it’s clear to the reader.

• I don’t have to do this. There is no consequence from not doing it. It’s okay to walk away. You want to do this.

• Humour. 

That’s it. I need to re-order and structure. I need to work out if I open it before starting to blog or as I start out. I need to iterate, but it’s a start.

3. Third thought: Journaling

This point was more of a general point that I recognised as I was writing out the draft of this post in my notebook. Thank you to whatever brought me to clicking on the random Tim Ferris youtube video about journaling a week ago. It helped give some structure to the journaling I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks, allowing me to recognise that I want to do a mix of morning pages style journaling and 5 minute journal style journaling.

The morning pages journaling has been especially useful (even though it hasn’t necessarily felt like it at the time of writing), as it has given me a place to explicitly write down anxieties free range. That explicitness has let me recognise that not blogging was becoming an issue for me, and therefore has given me the opportunity to address that. Otherwise, I don’t know if I necessarily would have picked up that it was hovering around in my mind.

Therefore, continue with journaling in this style. Prioritise focussing on it. Journaling = beneficial.

Day one results

I feel a sense of satisfaction from aligning i.e. matching something I value doing with actually doing it.

Now I just need to keep the wheel spinning. Easy, right?

I’m sure that recognising these thoughts will go some way to making that a reality. I wonder where else these thoughts would end up being applicable.

Any other tips and insights would be gratefully received!