Tag Archives: blogging

Making it public

When you want to see changes in your life, make them public.

I was unsatisfied with my routines, so I shared them here. I followed up with a couple great workouts, where I pushed myself.

A comment on that post inspired another post, and I started a fictional audio book that I had in my cue for the holidays. I listened while eating my dinner, (family was out), doing the dishes, and for an hour and a half of entertainment afterwards. This was far more than I listened to for most of the week.

It’s an easy but important step in achieving your goals. If you want something to happen, if you want to push yourself to meet a goal, then let others know about it. It doesn’t have to be a blog post, it can be a conversation with your spouse or a friend. It an be a challenge with a coworker, (several of my colleagues bought Fitbits and are sharing their step counts with each other).

If you really want to change something, put it out into the world, and see how that motivates you to actually do it!

More on writing every day

“When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can start working on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30pm because it’s ready, It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we are creative, we are creative because we ship. Take what you get, and commit to a process to make it better.” Seth Godin, ‘The Practice’.

Seth has written over 7,000 blog posts on his daily blog, dating back to 2002. One interesting point that he makes is that no matter how many posts he writes, 50% of them are his worst 50%, and not as good as the other half. It’s impossible to do better than that. It’s not about doing great work every day, it’s about ‘shipping’ work every day. It’s about being creative every day, it’s about the process… the practice.

I’ve written pieces that I’ve thought were quite good, and no one will probably ever look back at them. I’ve knocked off a quick post with little thought, and it garnishes comments and positive feedback… and occasionally these two things coincide. But it’s not accolades or attention that matters to me nearly as much as the commitment to write every day. To do the creative work. To wordsmith, to ponder, to question, and to practice the art of writing.

So forgive the typos, the comma splices, the run on sentences. Indulge me when I intentionally break convention. Like this. This is my muse, and I do my best to ship every day. And exactly half of the time, you’ll get better than average work from me.

Thinking and sharing in the blogosphere

Yesterday I wrote about this quote, “Mindfulness is a pause – The space between stimulus and response: That’s where choice lies.” ~ Tara Brach

And Shiela Stewart shared a post she wrote with a similar quote, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  ~ Viktor E. Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning

Sheila wrote this in July of 2014, over 7 years ago. Although I wasn’t blogging every day back then I had already been blogging for 8 years. In those early blogging years I was an avid reader of other blogs, including Sheila’s, and a whole host of other educators. We were all writing, and reflecting, and learning from each other. We were in a community that understood the power of sharing our thoughts out in the open.

But there were other people who didn’t understand why we would do this. There were those that questioned how we had the time. Those that thought we were self-indulgent and thought we were only writing for self promotion rather than self reflection and learning. That’s still around today but not as much.

The reality is that I enjoy writing. I’ve enjoyed it since high school. And I feel like a writer when I share my work publicly… when I share my work in a community of other writers. When I add to the blogosphere.

And I absolutely love when another blogger shares their work with me. I totally see why Sheila connected the two quotes above. I understand her ‘blogger’s mind’ that thinks, ‘Dave will appreciate me making this connection’. I love that the connection was to a 7-year-old post, and the Sheila was able to put the connection together so many years later. Bloggers can do that. They can pull an idea up from a decade ago and see how it relates all these years later. And they aren’t afraid to share those thoughts.

This is driven by an understanding that when we learn in the open we are exposed to more connections and ideas than when we keep our learning to ourselves. The idea of being an open and connected learner is one that I think can still be misunderstood, but it isn’t misunderstood by those who are doing it, only by those on the outside that don’t get it. This isn’t ‘insider information’, it’s not a secret. We happily share it out in the open, here in the blogosphere.

14 years

I remember joining Twitter reluctantly in 2007. I thought, ‘I never update my status on Facebook, why would I join a new social media platform that is just the one feature of another social media platform that I don’t use?’ But as an educational blogger, I was reading about how powerful this tool was for educators and I hesitantly jumped on board.

After a short experimental phase I was hooked. Things like this happened all the time!

I was connected to a powerful network of educators who went out of their way to make connections, build community, and converse about teaching and learning. I’d go to conferences and connect with people I’d never met face to face, but whom I knew well, thanks to this amazing tool.

I even wrote a book to help others get started on Twitter:

Twitter EDU

Now I no longer use Twitter, and most other social media tools, nearly as much. They have become one-way transmission tools for my daily blog, which auto-posts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn when I hit ‘Publish’. I focus more on productivity, writing, than spending time consuming and using these tools.

But it’s still fun to get notifications like this yesterday:

I may not be on it as much, but Twitter helped me create an amazing community, and I cherish the connections and memories made.

One dot day

Last Friday was a one sticker day for me. It was my first this year. I have been keeping a sticker chart of daily goals since January 2019. This year I give myself stickers for:

• Meditation (10 min. minimum)

• Exercise (20 min. cardio & a little weights or stretching)

• Writing (this daily blog)

• Archery (with a goal of 100 days this year)

On Friday morning I wrote my post and then got distracted with work emails and didn’t exercise or meditate. I thought I’d come home and make it up. I didn’t. That was the fourth meditation I missed out on in three weeks, whereas I had an over 130 day streak going around this time last year. So I recorded my only one sticker day this year.

Remembering that the best time to start a new streak is right now… I had two four-dot days this weekend, and while I won’t be shooting arrows today, I’ll meditate and exercise right after setting this post to be published this morning. Letting my meditation slide a bit has been a bad habit, and I’ll work on changing that for the rest of the year.

The sticker chart has been life changing for me. It seems simple, but with it I don’t overestimate what I’ve done in a week. It keeps me honest, and it keeps me motivated. No more one dot days for me!

I appreciate the comments

A big thanks to everyone who takes the time to read my daily writing. In the last week I’ve had comment responses to my Daily-Ink on my blog, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If I had to choose, I’d love to see these comments on my blog because then they ‘live’ attached to my post, rather than living on a timeline that passes by never to be seen again. That said, I know that if I didn’t automatically post my blog to these platforms, people wouldn’t see them at all, and it’s just easier to respond on the platform you are accustomed to. That’s the nature of social media these days, they are designed to keep you on their platform, watching their advertising, and engaging with them.

This is why when you share an Instagram picture on Twitter, you don’t see the image on Twitter, you see a link to Instagram, but when you share an Instagram picture on Facebook, you see the photo. Instagram and Facebook play nicely together because they are both owned by Facebook. It would be just as easy to have Twitter do this too, but the competing companies both want your attention.

So, I realize that comments will come in on many platforms, and although I said I do have a preference, I am truly grateful to converse/like/interact on any platform where a comment comes up. I’m quite honestly honoured when anyone takes the time to engage with my posts. I know and appreciate that my mom reads them regularly, and beyond that, I am often flattered and amazed that I get responses from local and distant friends alike… from those I know in my daily life, and from those whom I’ve never met face to face but am connected to inline.

I marvel at the idea that anyone can be their own publisher and share ideas across platforms and across the world, and I thank you for taking the time to interact with my journal of public thoughts.

Disengaged from the socials

It has been a slow process, but I’ve really disengaged from interactions on social media. It has become a one-way transmission tool for my daily blog, and not much else. Well, other than 30 minutes of TikTok that I watch instead of TV, but that’s entertainment rather than engagement. My only social media comments tend to be responses made to my posts about my blog.

I think the disengagement started with US political news dominating everything a few years back. I got fed up watching post after post that had no real connection to me as a Canadian, but still angered and upset me. I got tired of the childish anger and upset. Then came the pandemic, and more (digital) yelling and screaming about how to handle it… with healthy doses of ignorance and bickering about the science. But this fighting isn’t between professionals and real experts, it’s between doctors/scientists and ‘armchair experts’ that demonstrates how expert they are at spewing stupidity and ignorance.

Between politics and pandemic, I’m really done engaging on social media much. That said, these topics still reach me, and I still find myself talking about them here on my blog. Now there is a Canadian election, but I tend not to discuss who I’m voting for and why. Instead, I prefer to focus on encouraging people to get out and vote. I think it’s our duty as citizens to exercise our right to vote, and even want to see tax related fines for those that don’t.

I might be disengaged from social media. I may not like the news that I see. But I believe we should all be appreciative and respectful of living in a democracy, and that we should participate in a democracy if we want to keep it. If we value having a voice, we should use it in a vote… before worrying about what that voice should be saying on social media.

Keeping the IKEA streak alive

It’s not a streak to brag about. Every time I build IKEA furniture I do something wrong. Tonight I put a piece on backwards and taking it off took much longer than putting it on. Added to that, a cheap plastic fastener that holds one of the shelves together broke, and another trip to IKEA will need to happen. Fortunately, I had a lot of good help from my daughter and wife, and it was my wife that caught the mistake before I went to far ahead.

https://twitter.com/datruss/status/1434409327616421889?s=21

That may not be a steak that I’m too proud of, but here I am at midnight making sure that my steak of daily blogging stays in tact… something positive to go to bed thinking about. I hope to break the bad IKEA streak soon, but keep my Daily Ink streak going!

Before the sun rises

Today was the first day in a very long time that my alarm went off before sunrise. Part of this is getting back into a routine before work, part of it is that the days are a little shorter as we head into fall. It took me a while to actually get started this morning. I literally could have woken up 45 minutes later, because none of my usual routine got started until then. It’s amazing how slow I can be, how easily distracted, when I’m off of a routine. Put me on a routine and I get stuff done. Remove the routine and I lose focus.

This makes me think about a typical day at work. How much of it is me focusing on the next issue or concern that arises versus getting what I need done? Some days the answer to that is quite surprising. I had a vice principal tell me years ago, “You know, being a VP is really just a 3-4 hour a day job. The problem is that you usually can’t get most of that done between 8am and 4pm. That was a vice principal in a school that also had a principal. When you are the lone principal in a building this can be even more challenging with more duties and less time.

That’s why I get up so early. I write for this blog (usually by 6:00 even though I publish it a bit later). I meditate for 10 minutes. I do 20 minutes of cardio followed by 10-15 minutes of stretching and/or weights. I get stuff done for me, before the distractions of the day start… and as the days get shorter, before the sun rises.

It’s a wonderful feeling of accomplishment to do these things for myself before my work day begins; before the unexpected distractions of my typical day; before I get home exhausted and full of excuses as to why I should skip one of these activities. After a very routine-less holiday, it’s going to take me a while to get used to this. But eventually I’ll fall back into the routine of waking up in the dark and getting my mental and physical well-being taken care of before the sun comes up.

2 years and a week ago

On July 6, 2019 I wrote ‘It’s Time…‘ and said,

“I tried over a decade ago, now I’m going to do it – a short daily blog.

It’s time…”

I don’t think I’ve missed a day since. It hasn’t always been easy. I sometimes don’t think I have anything worth sharing. But sometimes I write something that just feels right. Other times I just jot down a simple thought and it ends up getting more engagement from readers than I’d ever expect. I know I only have a handful of daily readers, but I have quite a few weekly readers that check out a post or two when it lands in their Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook feed.

I am thankful to have people read my writing, but I feel that I do my best writing when I forget my audience. I readily admit that I enjoy getting ‘likes’ and comments, and yet sometimes the simple act of hitting the ‘Publish’ button is all the reward I need.

My blog tag line now reads, “Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.”

As I state in the post where I originally wrote this, “The act of writing makes me a better writer. The commitment to this act every single day is itself a reward, making me feel like I’ve accomplished something before I even start my work day.”

Two years of public daily writing is a commitment that I wasn’t sure I could accomplish, and now I wonder how long I will keep going for? For right now, I feel that I have far more reasons to continue than to stop. So this blog will be continued every day until….