Streaks

Needs coffee
Pic just for cuteness factor

Hey, did you notice I blogged every day in the month of October? Either here or in the garden blog. It was one of my October goals, the main one I actually achieved. (I also kept this goal private, I think, so as not to set expectations for my fans.) It turns out I like daily blogging, and I may continue at an increased pace for a while, coasting on the momentum. But I'm no longer mentally fixed on "every day". I've found the psychology of a streak works for me for a little while, giving me increased motivation for what it is. But after a while, if I break the streak, then I get into the "why bother at all?" mindset and stop completely whatever it was. So "more often" is how I'm going to think about it, not "every day".

 

 

 

 

 

 A couple of things I noticed about daily blogging:

• I like posts with pictures, even if the picture is barely relevant. 
• Posts with mostly pictures are not cheating, especially if its a garden blog post. The visual record is an important part of the blog.
• As I went about my days, there was some increased mindfulness around, "I could write about this for the blog". It made me more self-conscious during the day, in what I think was a good way.
• I wanted a topic for each post, (versus just a general checkin) but it didn't have to be heavy or long. 
• It was ok to post about things that weren't entirely current, if the post had something worth saying (again, not profound, but at least mildly interesting or amusing).
  
• It's much easier to post using the laptop than the ipad (and almost impossible using the phone). And my current laptop boots up much more quickly than the ancient one I replaced this spring. That reduced a barrier to posting.
• With Blogger, posts can be written and then posted at a later scheduled time. A few times, when I was inspired, or I knew I would have a hard time finding the time in the next day or two, I stacked up posts in advance. I did this especially with garden blog posts.
• Sometimes I broke long posts up into multi-day posts, sometimes written together and then staged to go up once a day. That was based on my wanting to hit the "every day", and also not impose on my readers' attention spans.
  
• The self-consciousness, and maybe the writing, actually stimulated more private journalling rather than replacing it. This surprised me.
• I like writing. I've just finished another story-telling class, and it led me to think a bit more about the crafting of a story. This mostly hasn't bled over into the blogs, which are more stream-of-consciousness, but I'm thinking about it a lot. 
  
• For some time, I've organized my pictures I use in the blog into google albums, one for each blog and year. I chose google some time back as the cloud storage for all my photos, so iphone photos go there automatically and off-loaded camera pictures go there manually. But I take so many photos that it's helpful to have the blog pics in an album dedicated to this year's blog so I can find them again.