Life

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  • Clicking publish on 32 posts

    It began with seeing a post in Slack and then 32 posts later; I find myself writing the 33rd today. Since that post, I have clicked publish every day, and I wanted to unpack what I’ve learned and plan to do from here.

    Not missing a day

    One of the biggest things I found myself doing was making sure I posted once a day, no matter what I wrote. I would at times queue posts up, but sometimes they would be instead of replies on other forms.

    Having different platforms

    I knew from the start I wanted to write across 3 different areas; this helped me vary up the posts: personal/musings, design/work/thought pieces, theme/WordPress focused. I also ended up creating a page even to collate all these right here.

    Writing leads to iteration

    One of the things that happened writing every day, and using my sites led to iterating them. I shook out a lot of bugs and issues in the first few weeks. I began creating things along the way. I might have done this at some point because I was in the space writing it placed me there.

    Creating drawing every day

    For two of the sites I wrote on, I also created visuals every time. This meant I was often sketching and writing every day. I found this really powerful and something I want to mix in a little more in the future (more on that later).

    Learning

    This experiment has taught me a few things:

    • Doing something every day creates a habit. I am both faster at writing and also the ideas come easier now.
    • I am less scared of that publish button having clicked it every day.
    • When I got the opportunity to create longer form that was more rewarding for me. I want to explore more essay type writing than short thoughts.
    • Having a few spaces is useful for my mindset, but one place to collate them is beneficial too.
    • If I use the tools I write with and create for, I am going to have much better ideas on ways to improve them. This also impacts the themes I use on my sites.

    Where now?

    In short, I will stick with clicking publish every day, however, with a slight change. I plan to click publish on something; this might be not just writing in the future. During this, I began exploring other challenges to spark myself, such as photo ones and others. To start that, I have breathed a bit of life back into my sketching and photo blogs.

    I want to commit to beyond publishing something each day, writing at least one post on each of my sites a week; this feels very manageable after the frenzy of one a day. I might do more, but one a week feels comfortable going forward, enough to keep a pace. At least once a month, I would like to write a longer piece, although I would prefer to make that more frequent, so I will see how that works.

    A huge thank you to Cory Miller for starting Click Publish, and if you’ve not joined in, there is no set time, so I’d encourage anyone to consider it. For me, it’s given me a renewed energy and flow to my creation, which is going to fuel me. I also know if I ever get stuck again, I will pick up the challenge again. Having the format be so rigorous but for a set time I know will help me get unstuck and just click publish in the future.