in Writing challenge

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve challenged myself to write a blog post every day in 2016. 365 posts. Day by day.

If you’ve truly been following me, than you know I broke my streak last week and haven’t posted a single post.

While I have been writing every day, I haven’t been posting everyday .

For me, the problem with writing daily is not about finding what to write about.If you’re active and do a lot of things, you will always have something about.

My problem is attention span.

Stopped writing on the weekends

After 2 weeks of writing everyday, without skipping even one post, I understood what this challenge is taking from me really.  It’s not time (though it takes times), it’s not creativity, but it’s attention span.

When you are writing, or about to write, you’re always in research mode. Which means you are never fully present.

 

I felt it the most on the weekends.

Because my mind was set on reseaerch mode all the time, I wasn’t “fully there” with my family. I was always half thinking about “what will I be writing about”.

Then it also became very clear to me that the challeges should help me improve myself. Either for the short term or long term.

For the short term – it was hurting my quality time with my family. In the long term – I don’t think that not writing in the weekends will hurt me in any way. Jusy by doing 5 days a week, I’m already outperforming most writers out there.

Actual work VS. Daily posts

So we got weekends off. But last week I didn’t write at all.

Instead of writing for this blog I focused on writing some guest posts and doing additioanl stuff for my clients.

We recently had some staff changes and I need to put in more time into working with our clients on content.

At the first day I actually prioritized writing the daily post over finishing up something for a client (the deadline was in 2 days so I knew I can make it). That was a bad move as it threw my groove off for the next two days .

Again, did the short term – long term analysis and decided that it’s Ok not to write until I’m up to speed with everything.

Lack of strategy

Another thing is that the original thougt was that writing a post every day will encourage me to get back into writing the more in-depth content as well.

What really happend was that writing everyday makes me more “random” and “spontenouse” about my content in general. Which might be fun to read, but it doesn’t form a plan.

If you’d look at my calander (or follow me on Snapchat) you’ll see that I literally have no time to spare.

Ask each one of my employees – I’m either at meetings, plannign strategies, directing my team. Even in between meetings I will answer questions on Twitter, update on Snapchat, answer email, and answer more questions on Snapchat.

I try to maximize my time as much as possible to be productive, but there is literaly no time to spare.

When you do something, and lose track of where it sits in your strategy – you’re wasting time.

The fact for example that this post is talking about “why I haven’t written in 5 days” is basically a sidetrack to me talking about the process of building a new company.

Which means, it’s not driving me forward. For people who like to read my content, this post might be a nice read, but doesn’t provide any additional value.

Which agin, makes it busy work and a waste of time.

Takeaways:

I shouldn’t be writing when there’s no plan in place.

It doesn’t mean that this blog needs to be a 100% planned and strategized. This is the place for random thoughts and proceesses.

But I also should make sure that I’m not wasing your time or mine.

So what do you think? Do posts like these interest you?

Let me know in the comment.s

 

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  1. Absolutely. Sometimes we try to go for quantity (of content) and as a result, quality (of life/work, etc) suffer. The strategy is not flawed, it just needs to be refined. You are someone who knows how to refine. I look forward to seeing where this goes 🙂