My Blogging Adventure

Posted by: David on: 18 April 2008

• In: creativity | kaizen | self development
• 14 Comments

Photo by eye of einstein.

This week my Kaizen challenge was to blog every day. It was quite an adventure, especially finding so many beautiful photos on flickr – I was spoilt for choice! I thought I’d share the mountains climbed, the seas sailed, and the lessons learnt.

Posting to my blog every day was a challenge that I enjoyed, and I learnt a number of lessons from the difficulties that came up.

The main difficulties were getting motivated, finding the time to write, and technical problems with my internet connection. Also, because I was writing everyday, I felt that I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to research and plan my posts, so they could have been better quality.

The four key things I learnt were:

1. Writing blog posts takes a lot of time

Like any venture or adventure, you need to set aside time to blog. I think that’s why there are so many blogs in the world with only one or two posts – people set them up thinking it only takes five minutes a day.

I have found that it takes around 2 hours to write a blog post, find exciting pictures and relevant links, and edit it all together in WordPress. This is longer than I expected, and it means that if I was to continue posting every day, it would be a big time commitment.

2. The need for planning and research

Photo by gadl.

When travelling there’s nothing worse than finding that your destination is sweltering hot and there’s nowhere to buy sunscreen. Research and planning are vital skills for even the novice traveller.

It was much easier to write blog posts when I had drawn up a rough plan in my notebook. I would have liked to have had more time for research, as quality research leads to quality blog posts.

3. I love writing

Since I left school I have always imagined myself as a writer, and at the moment I am fortunate enough to earn money writing. However, I found writing for pleasure about topics I choose even more enjoyable. The difficulty has been finding the motivation to do it, and committing myself to writing a blog post every day really helped.

4. Contributing is better than lurking

Adventure travel can be a solitary past-time, but it’s also one of the most sociable. You’re likely to get lost, lonely and bored very quickly if you’re not willing to communicate with fellow travellers. And it always amazes me the opportunities that arise when you do pluck up the courage to chat to that random person sitting next to you on a train.

Peter at The Change Blog has a great post about how being a contributor to the internet (through commenting on blogs, writing a wikipedia entry, writing your own blog, etc.) is so much better than just ‘lurking’ on other people’s web pages. Writing my own blog, I have found the truth of this for myself. It is very satisfying to see your own work on the internet.

Tags: adventure, blogging, research, writing