Reflections on my daily posting schedule

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.

Why do we do what we do?

I came across this post about motivation from one of the guys behind Basecamp*. The thrust of the article is that too many people are obsessed with the process of building a business simply to get rich. The post is about the Silicon Valley, but it could just as easily be about art and design.

It seems today that designers have been successful making their side project a full time gig.** And so it seems that every side project is a failure if it doesn’t eventually become a full time job. 

At times, I’ve forgotten why I started Sketchbook B. I’ve started paying too much attention to web traffic and font sales. But the goals for Sketchbook B have never been about building an audience, selling ads or making money. It’s all about experimenting and having fun.

One of the goals for Sketchbook B was to give me a chance to write more, but I wasn’t writing consistently. So recently I started to post daily. I made the decision to try a publishing schedule to force myself into a routine because I wanted to get more disciplined about writing.

After a couple of weeks though, my weekly page views were pretty much unchanged. I wondered if it was worth the effort. No one new was reading. But I came across Matt Gemmell’s post about “blogging” and I remembered that page views aren’t the point. Writing was the point. And I’m enjoying my site more in the last few weeks than I have at any time since I started it in 2008.

I’ve come to the realization that “side project” might be the wrong term for what I do. Maybe “passion project” is a better phase. I write, design type and experiment because I love design and creativity. My typefaces and other random projects were never intended to be a full time job. I’m looking to be creative in ways that I can’t be at work.***

Sketchbook B is simply my creative outlet, and I'm proud of that.

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* I’ve used Basecamp for years. And I was a devoted user of Backpack before 37 Signals phased it out. :(

** It probably seems that way because so many people were starting side projects during the recession.

*** I seriously have the best day job.

Blogs?

Yesterday, I came across a short essay about blogs on Matt Gemmell’s site. He questions the term “blog” and challenges the way we talk about blogs.

The whole thing is fabulous, but one thing stood out to me especially:

So what is a blog, exactly? I have no idea - and I think the question is irrelevant. The deeper issue is what your own work means to you.

I’ve had this site since 2007 and have been writing sporadically for the last 8 years. I started writing daily a few weeks ago specifically because I wanted to get more serious about writing. And for me, part of that means setting and sticking to a schedule.

But my site is a hodgepodge of randomness. Most of the time, it’s design. A typeface rollout. A Creative Cloud tip here and there. And scattered thoughts on fountain pens, science fiction, cars, sports and Columbia.

As a creative professional, I’ve struggled with how to focus all these things. How do I structure this randomness? But after I read Matt’s essay, I realized that I don’t need to give it structure. This site is a reflection of my projects and interests.

And I really need to embrace that.