Aug 21 2008
Eating Crow and Staying Up Late
For those of you following along this August, some bloggers here at Penn State have been writing a post a day. Cole and Anne gave their thoughts in posts yesterday so I’d like to reflect on the Post a Day challenge as well.
It’s interesting that I’ve had similar *and* completely different thoughts and feelings about taking part in the post a day challenge.
And today, I’ll be eating some crow. I’ll get to that later, though.
First, I agree with Cole and Anne. Writing every weekday for a month is definitely making me focus more. As I’m working throughout the day and come across something worth mentioning, I open up a blog draft and jot it down so I don’t forget. It’s made me really pay attention to what I’m doing at work (when I find myself working on analytics). That seems weird. Shouldn’t you be focusing on what you’re doing all the time at work? Sure, but it’s made me *really* focus – paying more attention to steps, objectives, reasons. It’s forced me to truly think about *actionable* insights and not just reporting. What a great side effect of this challenge!
What’s odd, though, is that sometimes I find myself focusing too much. For many reasons, I have to write my posts at night. I put a lot of time into both thinking about my topics and writing the post. Because of that, I spend much of every night on my post – either jotting things down, looking things up, writing or editing. I don’t think I’m much of a writer, but I am a relentless editor. I tend to read my writing over and over, constantly editing.
The eating crow part. It’s funny that I mention editing because in yesterday’s post, I actually edited my post so much I created mistakes. I cut and pasted, deleted and edited so much that I ended up completely screwing up the first paragraph. Cutting and pasting in the wrong place. Not a good thing for first paragraph!
To make matters even worse, the entire post was actually a rant about design and function of websites. So, I’m ranting about other websites when I had such a blatant, awful mistake on my own! Boy, did I feel like an idiot tonight when I re-read my post yet another time. How could I have let that through? I need an editor for my edits! The mistakes have been corrected, but probably way too late. I’ve absolutely learned a lesson – to leave well enough alone! Live and learn, right? : )
Moving along …
Reading fellow bloggers. Another great thing about a post a day is that I’m reading all the other *post a day* blogs on a daily basis. I love the variety of topics and am really trying to participate and comment where and when I can.
So, thanks Cole, for giving us this challenge. It has been hard, but it has absolutely been worth it!
The idea was to challenge myself … when others joined in it turned into something very organic and cool. I’ve been discovering and reading new blogs through participants … people are clearly reading other people and linking to them, which is great! IT opens up my circle even further.
No need to eat crow … so many of my posts show up looking like my 6 year old wrote pieces of them. It is hard sometimes to work to not filter our own content. I write, then go back and re-read, only to change my original intent unknowingly. Part of blogging is trusting yourself in the moment. That is a hard thing to do. So, thank you for taking part in this nice show of community!
Shelby, I thought this was a great post. I actually started to comment, but then decided to trackback instead… but apparently your blog isn’t picking up the Trackback ping. So here’s my thoughts on your post. Thank you for writing about this today. It really coincided with my own observations.
Cole and Robin. Thanks so much for your comments. I’m so glad to hear I’m not the only crazy person that fanatically edits their own posts! Cole – you are so right. I am still searching for that self trust. Hopefully I’ll find it shortly!
You’re no where close to being the only fanatical editor. I could literally spend 10 hours editing a post!! Anyway, I want to mention that although I am not participating in the post-a-day challenge, all of you who are have inspired me to create another blog and drastically pick up the pace of my posts. So, thanks for that.
I also sent a trackback to one of your earlier posts, the one about you goals. I see Robin’s comment and want to make sure you know (at least one) of the effects of your blog. So here goes nothin’, http://tinyurl.com/6pn5sn. Sorry, I don’t know how to add in a fancy link like Robin did!
BTW—thanks for the great info. I’m barely keeping up but I’m still hangin’ on!
I don’t know if I’ll spend hours editing a post, but I’ll definitely spend way to much time optimizing one. Doing the keyword research, playing around with semantic markup, trackbacks, meta data and sometimes even the social media campaign after posting something.
Granted I do a LOT less of this than I did in the beginning of blogging, but it’s really one of those things that you get better with the more you do. When I go back and look at my first few months of blogging posts and compare them to the stuff I’m putting out now, I wish I had the time to go and really reedit them all over again. There is no doubt that blogging will make you a much better writer and really spend the time to be able to verbally explain what and why you do things. I also completely agree with you about blogging also making you think and analyze what we do more. I might not get as many things done as I used to, but the ones that I do are definitely much better documented, communicated, and shared. Which all in all is just as important, because if people don’t know about it then how important was it for you to spend so much time on it in the first place?
Christina – thanks for the shout out on your blog. I appreciate it. I’m glad you’re finding some of the posts here helpful. If I can be more clear or helpful with anything, just let me know!
Kyle – I must admit that I don’t do as much of the keyword research, semantic markup, etc. that you mention. I do it somewhat, but nowhere near what I should be doing. Thanks for the virtual kick in the butt (as unintentional as it may have been!). I need to get going on that!
[...] know I’ve already posted about my thoughts on the post-a-day challenge, but I’d love to sum up the experience as a whole … and [...]