Learning from Day 2 of #BlaugustReborn

Daily Ramble 5: Learning from Missing a #Blaugust Goal

Hmm…not even 2 days into #BlaugustReborn and here I am trying to catch up with my plans. Of course this is a typical situation since I always lay out goals that require me to go outside my comfort zone. But who am I kidding, most days I’d rather be actually playing games or watching a movie than writing a blog post. Sure, I could use craziness at work as an excuse or date night but that wasn’t the main cause of me missing my self imposed 6am posting time…nah, it was all kinds of things and I should have planned ahead of time. But then these are the things one needs to learn when they want to blog regularly.

Topic Ideas

Laying out topic ideas and scheduling time to write has always been two of my biggest issues with blogging. Yes, I come up with plenty of ideas and the way I’ve been working on things lately, I’ve got naturally generated content – Baseball games, Marvel comic releases, books I’m reading, etc.

Here are a few others that I’ve thought about that might be useful as seeds for posts:
-Matching character classes to play style
-Tools needed for deciphering Secret World Legends missions
-Using Evernote to facilitate blogging
-Image processing on an iPad for posts
-Why do I find myself disliking Captain America

But even with all those content ideas and the wonderful writing prompts from fellow #Blaugust participants it doesn’t make up for a failure to plan time to write.

Time to Write

Similar to most normal people I have a ton of things going on in my life. From actual work to yard work, from educating myself to spending time with Mrs. Redshirt, there’s a lot of stuff to do and only 24 hours in a day. If college taught me anything it’s that sleep is usually the loser when it comes to prioritizing what activities I focus on, but that doesn’t mean I always spend my waking hours engaged in productive things. Even if I try to reduce myself to 4-6 hours of sleep, I have 8 hours of work plus travel time. I’ve got to eat, and sadly one of the items that’s also been getting neglected – I need to do a little exercise at least. With these requirements and others I can’t think of off the top of my head, I work hard to create a few hours that I have semi control of. It’s during these hours that I run into the dilemma of choosing between playing a game, watching TV, reading, or writing a blog post about those activities.

It’s kinda a catch 22.

I play games or read books or comics to give myself content to write about when I sit down and write. But if I don’t write, what’s it all for?

I suppose it’s still for my enjoyment and relaxation but part of that enjoyment comes from writing about these things.

Lessons Learned

With that in mind, I started trying to manage the bit of free time that I have and so far things have been falling through the cracks like they did yesterday and this morning…no post out by 6am today.

Well, like most things in life, this is a work in progress. When I can’t get a post out in the time frame I want, it’s not the end of the world. The content is still out there and the desire to write is still there. I just need to make sure I don’t let the failure of a timely post prevent me from getting something written.

That’s one of the important lessons I’ve learned from blogging and from trying to throw out a post each day…just do it. Don’t let setbacks prevent you from reaching your goals because there are always gonna be impediments.

And always learn from the experience.

Based on missing this self imposed deadline I’m gonna work to lay out a few pre-staged posts. Ones that are ready to go at a moment’s notice and never get out of date. That way if I run outta time I will always have something that I can just push the button on and…posted…goal met.

Degrees of Time Legends