Zest

The last post of the challenge!

It’s been great fun, a real caper.

Blogging for these last 26 days has been a great practice – I’ve been surprised at how it’s given a bit of zest to my day.

I’ve been amused to see that I was indeed able to regain my daily blogging mojo. This shouldn’t have been that surprising, really, given that a few years ago, I did blog daily (if not daily, very frequently).

It hasn’t been too difficult to blog. Once I decided I was going to do the challenge, I did three things. I:

1. Made time everyday to write something. (This was, in hindsight, the main thing. I sat down and wrote something, even if, some days, I was very vague on what I was going to write.)
2. Kept notes of ideas so I have something to follow up on: stuff to read more about, think about, write more about.
3. Oh, and I planned ahead a little bit. Because of the challenge I always knew the next post was going to have to be about the letter G, H, I… whatever. So I was always thinking about my next posts. But I left it flexible – I might start off thinking I was going to write about something, and even put down a few ideas about it, but then in talking to M something he said might jog a new idea, or I might read something and decide I was going to write about that instead. Having a theme has been very useful – some structure but nothing too fixed.

It’s also been very fortuitous that in the past month, I’ve come across posts like Why You Should Write Daily by Leo Babauta. Encouragement, reinforcement, is always good!

I’m planning to maintain a daily blogging practice. I’ll keep one day of the weekend free, as we did during the challenge. Sunday was the blog-free day during the challenge, and so while I didn’t post on Sundays, I found that I used the time to think back over the past week, and think ahead, plan a few posts, while not worrying too much about producing something for that day. Having the one day off was good.

May is the month in which the 23 Mobile Things course starts for the ANZ cohort. I’ve volunteered to be a mentor for the learners, so I may have some topics to blog about from the course. And then June is #blogjune, so really it should be quite possible to sustain this routine for a while longer…

The one thing I wanted to do but didn’t manage much of, was visiting other blogs. I did add a few blogs to my Feedly account, and followed a few new people on Twitter, but that was the extent of it. Seeing as I am going to need inspiration to keep blogging, now that the challenge is over, I will try to drop in on a few from time to time.

Note: I was going to call this post “Zing”, but before I did that I checked the definition of the word, and found that Urban Dictionary lists some new definitions for the word. Zest is perfectly adequate.