Disruptive Conversations

Ouch... I was doing so well... I have been well on my way toward my goal of 365 days of blog posts in 2011. I published a blog post every single day of January and February, including the entire week I was on vacation.

And then I blew it and missed the goal instead on just a regular, mundane Saturday...

I did NOT publish a blog post on Saturday, March 5, 2011.

Not on any of my personal blogs... not on any of Voxeo's blogs... nowhere. :-(

Now, yesterday I did create my weekly audio report for the For Immediate Release podcast, but that doesn't count since it won't actually be online until Monday. I did post some photos to Facebook and post some status updates there. I did put out a few tweets, too.... but none of the longer-form content on my blogs that this goal was all about.

I could, of course, rewrite history a bit and publish a post today that was dated yesterday. None of you would know just from reading the blogs... but of course that wouldn't be honest and, besides, close examination of my Twitter stream would show that I didn't publish any posts (and... (gasp!)... I only tweeted twice yesterday). :-)

I can't claim it was any big distraction... it was just a regular Saturday. I was exhausted after a crazy week of travelling and was just enjoying my first full day back with my family. Doing some errands, taking a small road trip to see a local curling club, hanging around the house... just reveling in the normalcy of time at home. And completely spacing the fact that I didn't have a post queued up to go out.

And that's the key that has helped me achieve my goal thus far:

I have been scheduling my posts out several days in advance.

Acting on my own advice, I have been writing posts and queuing them up across my blogs. In effect I have had a blogging "buffer" that worked great for days like yesterday when I got busy and didn't think of writing (or thought about it, as I did several times, but didn't do it). For my vacation week, I had almost all the week queued up in advance for both my own blogs and the Voxeo blogs. I have had a queue of posts to go up online and then have added more posts that have been responding to breaking news or events. It's been working great.

So what happened?

Well, I unfortunately let the queue of written posts run dry. It certainly wasn't from lack of ideas... my brain continues to be constantly exploding with ideas. But I hadn't turned those ideas into actual written posts... which was exactly the discipline that this 2011 goal was all about.

So what now?

I will continue, of course. The goal will now be for 364 days of blog posts in 2011... and if I don't blow it again and continue the process into 2012 perhaps I will be back here on March 6, 2012, writing about how I wrote posts for an entire year!

I wondered if I could make it the whole 365 days... but didn't expect to miss it on day 64. Ah, well. (On the other hand, I had a truly wonderful day with my family yesterday, and at the end of the day that is what is most important! :-)

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