People occasionally question the amount time I waste on blogging and how it affects my productivity. First off, I advocate blogging as a means of professional improvement. I do not view any blogging as a waste. Blogging encourages research, citing of references, learning, exercising vocabulary and grammar skills, and recording of history via journaling. Blogging also polishes my technical side as I use CSS, obscure HTML, play with template designs and php code that I may not have the luxury of experimenting with on a client’s site, and use of tools which catch my xhtml errors causing me to be a better all around coder. Blogging and social networks build connections between other professionals and myself. Since I work alone in a basement, these connections are as valuable to me as the group of people someone else may work with in an office environment.
When do you find the time to blog? I blog on my breaks. Some people take smoke breaks. I take writing breaks. When I am getting the children ready for school in the morning, I cannot settle into coding but I can type out a few sentences of a post. Sometimes I do not finish the post and save it as a draft for later. I have 274 drafts of incomplete posts. This post has been sitting around since November 2, 2007 almost complete. At any time, I can change most of those into a published post within minutes. When my muse hits, say on the weekend, I may write a week’s worth of posts and schedule a couple of day for the next seven days. I had two posts publish today while I worked. They even surprised me! I have one scheduled for tomorrow that was written over the weekend.
A blog makes the reader feel they know the writer intimately; however, those words may be fiction or non-fiction, and the picture may be incomplete. The blogger may not be sharing the pain and trauma in their lives. The blogger may talk about the coolio new gadget in the house while concealing the fact that they had to hock a wedding ring and get food from Fish. In the same way, posts may publish on this blog that give the impression more time was spent on creative writing on a particular day than really happened.
Please enjoy reading Reality Me! If I do work for you, know that my duties come first, writing second.
