At the end of September, I decided that I wanted to be more structured with my writing. I wasn’t posting consistently and I wanted to write more. So I decided to set up a writing schedule.

My plan was to publish 5 days a week through the end of the year and then reevaluate. And so here I am — 13 weeks and 88 posts later — and it’s time to reevaluate. Here’s what I’ve learned:

I loved it. I really enjoyed writing more often. I grew up writing, but as a designer and a manager, I don’t get to write much for myself any more. And honestly, I really like the deadline pressure of having a schedule.
Writing sparks other creative endeavors. I found that writing more often tended to spark other creative ideas. I’m now got an army of things I want to tackle in the next year, and much of it came from things I posted on the blog.
I need to combine my blogs. A while back, I started an “Off-Topic” blog as a place to host my non-design related rants. I figured it would be best to segment my work that might appeal to different audiences. But while it made sense at the time, it didn't work so well in practice. Some blog posts were obviously off topic, but it wasn’t always clear where a post should go. (And some weeks, I only wanted to write off topic...) I think it makes sense to merge almost everything back into the main journal.
I need to find a new home for Wanted in Columbia. One of the reasons I started the “Off-Topic” blog is because I decided to fold Wanted in Columbia into Sketchbook B in hopes that I would update it more often. I am updating more often, but it needs to live on it’s own and have it’s own world. I thought about phasing it out, but I enjoy doing it too much to kill it. I may go back to Tumblr. Or Medium. And probably change the name. Look for more soon.
Traffic increased, a little. I wasn’t writing more frequently to drive up the number of visitors, but traffic did increase a little.
I’ve got to figure out how to promote with Social Media. One of the reasons traffic didn’t increase more was because I didn’t use social media very effectively. When I promoted posts, they did better. But when you are writing daily, I feel like promoting constantly is annoying your followers. I’ve got to figure out how I want to promote posts and what channels I want to use. I’m been using the free version of Buffer to organize things, but I may need to upgrade to the paid version.
I need to revamp the schedule. I like writing more regularly, but I need to revise the schedule. Since I’m moving Wanted in Columbia and folding the Off Topic Blog back into the main journal, I’ll need to revisit the schedule. I’m going to leave the Wednesday Quick Tip on Wednesday, though. I may scale back to 4 posts a week here on Sketchbook B.

I’m proud of my 13 week experiment. I’m going to take the next week or so during the holidays to figure out what form the schedule will take, but I’m absolutely going to continue to write with some kind of a posting schedule.