Creating, one day at a time
A collection of posts that I hope inspire you to take action!
I’m a procrastinator and a recovering perfectionist. I have more un-started and unfinished projects than I’m able to readily count. A major contributor is my desire for perfection. It’s a fight to let go and accept that good is often enough. I can declare success and move on. Or I can get started with imperfect preparation.
Have a big Inbox? How many messages do you have? How many are unread?
This is a situation where bigger is not better!
I have 1868 emails in my Inbox going back to Feb 2012, of which 360 are unread at this moment. And most of that is not spam! I’ve got some good spam filters running that do a pretty good job of controlling the noise that would otherwise overwhelm me.
I did have this at zero a few years ago! What happened and how do I regain control over my inbox?
I joined toastmasters recently and last week one of the other club members gave an impassioned speech with her vision of the club’s future. In it, she asked us to challenge the status quo. She asked some other things too, but the one that has been reverberating in my head for the last week is to understand how I go about challenging the status quo.
For a few years I’ve been pulling in the feed from Lifehacker and it was good. I was finding ways to make myself more productive, interesting applications that helped me organize elements of my life, do things better, etc. Times have changed though and there’s much less in the feed that I’m finding relevant or useful. Spending the time scanning through a fair amount of noise to find a few relevant tidbits of good signal has become a poor value for me. So I’ve dropped Lifehacker from my regular feeds.
I follow a number of bloggers and one that I want to acknowledge today is Chris Guillebeau who writes the blog The Art of Non-Conformity. I finished reading his article on 279 Days to Overnight Success this morning and found it jammed full of little pearls of wisdom and useful resources.
One I plan to embrace is to avoid Adsense and related technologies. I may point out products I’ve found useful and may even establish affiliate accounts with the provider in event a reader does follow a link to purchase. I will not however be creating space on the page specifically targeted for advertising products that are not my own, should I eventually have any. Another way of stating my intent is that the Firefox plugin AdBlock Plus should not block any content on this site.
I also plan to take things slow. Chris recommends building a store of content, about 3 months worth, before really launching a site. I like this idea, even though it means a fair amount of work with little external validation on the effort. I already have about 10 draft articles started, some are just concepts, others a bit more roughed out and still needing some polish before they are ready. In the early stages, the published articles will be focused on setting up the web site and track the evolution of my thoughts on what this site will become.
If you are thinking of starting a blog, or even want to re-imagine one you already have, I strongly recommend checking out Chris’s site.
