Before I get into what I want to write about tonight I want to say a huge thank-you to everyone who responded to my entry last night. I really appreciate the feedback and hearing what you think I should do as I progress further in this thing we call life. I will definitely formulate a plan using your responses and I will definitely get back to you on what actions I decide I need to take.
That brings me to the first topic I want to discuss tonight. Why are we so good at meta? Meta referring to talking about blogging (audio, video, text) on a blog website. To be honest with you it seems a lot of times those types of discussions are responded to the quickest. Maybe because everyone has their own ideas of what should happen because of course we are all doing this. Well, for the majority. I’m not saying that is a bad thing but I thought it was an interesting observation. Not just on my site but many others as well.
I do think that this type of “organic conversation” (is that the proper term, I hope so because I quite like it) is really a lot of fun. I start a topic that hasn’t been wrote about somewhere else and you chip in with what you think and then I respond back and then we keep the conversation going. Ok, granted, I have not responded to the comments on the previous posts yet but I wanted to wait until the majority of the people who were going to respond…responded (I can’t thank those of you who did enough). I do hope however that in the future I will be able to start an organic conversation about something that is demanding of a huge entry like I wrote last night which is probably not as deserving. However, many of my entries tend to be long because I am the type of person who writes everything I think, doesn’t do a lot of editing and prefers the type of writing that is like writing to a friend. Essentially, I write like I think which tends to make my entries long.
Second topic. Tonight I want to talk about regaining your focus. A while back I was talking to my friend Marti Abernathey about many of the same issues that I wrote about last night. Her advice to me was that I really needed to sit down and focus on something. Her opinion was that having too many projects to work on was keeping me un-focused.
She told me that I could focus on one project at a time. Focus on something one day, week, month at a time and that ultimately in the long term that type of focusing would pay off. Instead of trying to focus on every single project and getting out a ton of content in a short amount of time, look at the bigger picture. Instead of thinking two weeks down the road, think a year down the road. In a year what achievements will I have made with this project? What reasonable achievements do I want to make with this project?
She also mentioned another type of focusing where I would simply devote my time to working on one project and putting all of my energy into it. That is what happened for her with her multitude of project time being focused into her TransAdvocate blog. I definitely commend her for that and I do think that was the best thing for her because the site has grown so much in such a small amount of time, in my opinion.
For me I don’t think I could stop doing my two main social media projects and re-focus them in a central location due to the nature of the audiences and the topics discussed. When Marti was giving me this advice it was at the end of October and I decided that I was going to take the month of November and focus on working on my TechButter blog and do some more organizing and cleaning up over there in my spare time. Unfortunately, I didn’t get all the work I wanted done over there because of other paying projects which are more important. But, the attention that I did devote to that one project for the month of November did pay off. I checked several things off of my to-do list for that site that I had wrote two months prior to October.
I think following Marti’s advice as well as following the voice that sometimes pipes up in my head that says “GET OFF YOUR LAZY DUFF AND GET SOME WORK DONE” is the best advice that I can take and give. I do still have some focusing to regain but I think if I continue to follow this advice, in a year and for many years to come I think I will be extremely happy with the work that I have accomplished whether it be personal projects or professional projects.
Update: It’s just a few minutes after I published this post and I opened iTunes to listen to some music before I go to bed. The song I am listening to is “Hidden Sky” by Jami Sieber. Even though there are no words to the song it speaks to me in one way. It tells me that there is a hidden sky out there and by re-gaining my clarity and focus I will be able to see that hidden sky.
