Toastmasters project, complete!

I thought it would be apt to make my last post before completing my blogging project to write about the process itself. The Toastmasters project on “writing a compelling blog” wasn’t what made me start my blog, but I thought it aligned with my goal of producing more content. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have had as much content as I do now. I have had a good blogging experience this month. I achieved eight posts by following a single theme (Toastmasters) and a regular publishing schedule, reflecting on new and old experiences. Eight posts are enough to level up your writing skills, whether it be building the habit of posting frequently or becoming faster and more prolific.

When I first set out on this project, I anticipated less preparation time for each post. I wanted to grind out a quick post in 10-15 minutes, with a second revision pass, before tossing it into a page and publishing it. However, publishing a post is more challenging than I anticipated. It’s only natural that I underestimated the unknown effort. I probably spent closer to two hours on average on each post. Writing these posts is not unlike writing the minutes for the club in terms of effort involved.

On a tangential note, I also found myself reaching out to ask permission about posting things online. I wanted to make sure that I could share documents and names because content on the internet lives forever (albeit here on a small corner of the web). It turns out that reaching out to people over email isn’t too bad.

I hope that I’ll be able to convey my experience over this past month on Monday. I want to extoll the benefits of writing and the challenge of writing twice a week for a month. I also want to highlight some of my work’s layout and topics to inspire others to do something in the same spirit. Not everything that I write is interesting to everyone, but they are interesting to me. I found that the posts that I enjoyed the most were the ones that were rich with content and not merely mountains of text. There’s a precarious balance between making lasting content and being able to post frequently enough to get ideas onto paper before my attention lapses…

I hope this site is online for as long as I’m around to maintain it. I plan for this blog to be a growing body of work that I can look back on, read the things that I’ve written, and see my state of mind at a given time. It won’t be difficult at all to maintain a frequency of one post every week or two, now that I’m used to writing two or even three posts a week. It’s the first few steps that are the most difficult, and now I believe I have the foundations of a good habit in place.