I started this website as an experiment, but also as a low pressure creative outlet for myself. This marks the 26th piece that goes live on this site, and as cliche as it sounds, it has gone much quicker than I would have imagined. I am proud of what I have published so far, and even though there have been some rough patches, I am still glad that it is something I started, and am looking forward to finishing out the 2nd half.
There are 3 positives that I have recognized from developing a public creative schedule for myself.
- I am forced to do a lot more reflection For the first few posts, I had things that I wanted to publish stacked up because I had thought about them as I was getting the website up and running. After I ran through that stack, I no longer had a bank of ideas so I turned to more current topics that I was facing on a day to day basis. It was an excuse for me to reflect and process what was going on inside my head. Before starting, I rarely had time to do any reflection on any inputs I was taking in, but now I have another reason to make that a priority in my life.
- When I don’t know what to do with an idea, I have an easy place to go Along with reflection, over the past 26 weeks I have initiated a public journal that I was not expecting. I started daily journaling at the start of 2022, but those entries are typically 2-4 sentences long, and there are countless thoughts in my head that cannot be summed up in four or less sentences. This website has given me a place to go with the extended ideas. I’m able to refine them slightly more than if I just scribbled them down into a personal journal, but keeping the low bar in mind, I attempt to not put too much pressure on myself for how refined the idea is before it goes live. As I continue with this experiment, I imagine that I will become better at refining content before it goes live, but allowing more time for reflection and a place for those reflections to live has been a key lesson I have learned so far.
- I enjoy the process of developing With my professional background in development, I knew that I would enjoy actually creating the website itself. I did not realize how much of this experiment I would enjoy working on the behind the scenes. Admittedly, I have a much longer list of website features than I do content ideas. I highlight this more than the challenges, but with more time I would live to start cranking through both on a regular basis, but I am doing my best to prioritize content over features.
Along with the positives, there is one big challenge that I keep running into, time… This is not my full time job, and with that comes some realistic expectations when it comes to what priorities I have throughout the day. Unfortunately, that means that this is generally one of the last projects I’m able to get to, and it ends up resulting in my batch posting within a few days in order to keep pace with my goal. I do not regret doing that though. If I were to get too far behind, I fear that I would abandon the goal entirely. I’d much rather stay true and keep the average to one post a week versus feel the need to prioritize this website over important life things. This feeling probably comes from the timing of a lot of life events that were not in the forecast when I started this experiment. We moved, bought a house, had a few spells of sickness flow throughout the family, and the holiday season (I guess that was planned). This has really been the biggest disappointment for me so far, is the inability to make more time to work on something that I am actually enjoying. If I had more time I would definitely have made many changes to the site, added more features, and attempted to market it a bit more. With all of that being said, I’m not regretting starting the experiment, but more glad that the expectations I put on myself are with the lowest bar I could possibly jump over, but still requiring a bit of work to maintain.