I’m going to let you peek behind the curtain for a moment and remind you that sometimes creativity is smoke and mirrors, too.
Truth is, I write these words weeks in advance of you reading them.
Writing a daily blog is not always just about the dedicated day-after-day work of coming up with new ideas and then sitting down at a keyboard. Rather, sometimes it’s about working smarter and planning ahead. Sometimes it’s about organization and staging and schedules. Sometimes it’s a business plan.
You want a life skill? You want to be better at a desk job? You want to get into a corporate strategic mindset? You want to learn how to get stuff done on a schedule? Oh, you can read about it in a textbook or download a course on business planning.
But might I suggest that you try instead a big creative project.
Make a weekly web comic that demands you create on a schedule and manage a website.
Join a band and try to release a demo that involves scheduling, promotion and technical skills.
Write a novel that insists on long term strategic planning and holding big scope ideas in your head.
I write these posts sometimes weeks in advance and try to keep between five and ten in my publication queue. Not only does that save me from rushing to write something on topic on every busy morning, but it gives me time to edit and hone and shuffle and plan out how I am making this site.
It’s strategy. It’s planning. It’s bigger.
And it’s more than creativity: it’s resume fodder, too.
Terms FROm this POSt
- blog
- I am old. And I started posting formatted words and photos online before the word blog had entered the common lexicon. Most people work in the medium of social platforms these days, but being both a product of my time and a stickler for content ownership and control, I still lean into and promote the idea that the blog (a content managed general purpose personal website) is the beating heart of the internet I once knew and loved.
- corporate
- Having worked in many desk jobs, I tend to think of the corporate mindset and anything related to it as a kind of collective brain of capitalism and the search for profit. It is a core piece of the culture, but personally I’ve found it to be the antithesis of creative spirit, and often use the word as a pejorative in this sense.
- job
- This is a fuzzy word for me as I write this blog. I am technically self-employed, the overseer of a little one-man Canadian consultancy corporation. Hustling for contracts is hard work tho, so I occasional look for more steady employment gigs that interest me, and allude to it in my writing.
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
