New Year, New Start and all that…
Looking back, there’s no doubt that my blogging output has fallen away over the past few years as other forms of social contribution have risen (podcasts, Twitter, enterprise communities), and I want 2017 to be different.
I love that blog posts are the one form of created content that still offer a continuous timeline from the early days of social media through to today. As other platforms have risen, become popular and then fallen away again, the ability to add content to one’s own hosted blog (and to always retrieve it again) has remained constant. Even as I’ve allowed domains to lapse (and there have been a few!), or shifted blog engines (RIP DominoBlog) it’s been possible to easily consolidate posts and to keep the thoughts and comments they contained online.
Even if no one ever reads the posts (which thankfully isn’t the case!), there is more than enough value in the journalling aspect to justify the time taken to write and publish.
So, 2017 is going to be the year that I finally get organised and refocus on my blogs, particularly this one. To that end, I’m going to take my own advice that I offer to just about all enterprise community managers, and to get serious about a publishing schedule! A weekly set of planned post categories that reduce writing inertia, making it easier to get the virtual pen to paper, plus space to allow the more creative thoughts to bubble to the surface.
No more leaving posting to the vagaries of the daily workload, or to the late afternoon when tiredness and family distractions tend to kick in.There’s nothing like a daily to-do notification (or even paper calendar entry) demanding to be checked to not only kick off a new habit but to keep it going. Once a streak is past a month or so in length, it tends to become far less stressful to keep it going than to let allow it to lapse. Well, that’s the experience I’ve had anyway!
2017 is going to be the year of 365+ posts here on Stuart-McIntyre.com. A minimum of one per day. A year to make blogging (and the conversations that it starts) a core element of my personal and professional contribution once more. Better get cracking…