NaBloPoMo

It's National Blog Posting Month and you know what that means! No? Me either until a few weeks back, which is the first time I'd heard of it.

Maybe you have heard of NaNoWriMo though, or National Novel Writing Month, which is fairly well known. I've always been fascinated with NaNoWriMo and, more importantly, jealous of people who could pull it off. I read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird with fascination, and was totally bought into her idea of the "shitty first draft" and how important it is just to write, and not wait for inspiration to strike.

As I was mulling over whether to give Blog Posting Month a try I was listening to this podcast (okay, I tried to leave out the title–I really do listen to a podcast called How to be Awesome at your Job but, honest, it's really good) featuring the authors of Swipe: The Science Behind Why We Don't Finish What We Start. As a side note, the gist of this book as they explain it is mostly in the title–when we're doing something difficult we become uncomfortable, and we often work very quickly to get ourselves out of that reality and into a different one. While smartphones aren't the reason per se for that habit they do make "hitting that eject button" so quick, easy, and painless. Since we are what we habitually do, we actually can become better and better at avoiding what we don't want to do. Eventually we can even build a story around the idea that we just can't do a thing, because we've built up evidence for that fact.

In the interview Tracy and Tim talk a lot about NaNoWriMo being a great success story as far as getting people past that discomfort. Some keys to that success:

• People publicly commit to doing the thing (writing every day)
• They have a community of people that they can comiserate with, and can see struggling along with them
• Expectations are very low. The goal is to finish, not write a masterpiece (they brought up the "shitty first draft" in this context as well)

I took this episode as a sign that I should go ahead and give this a try, why not? I'm going to keep the bar very low, as in at least a post per week, but I'm going to try for every day minus weekends.

I've enjoyed the posts that I've done so far. As with journaling I always appreciate how it makes me order my thoughts and (especially with technical posts) thoroughly think through a topic. Also, just in general, I so enjoy blogging as a medium and would like to be a part of what I think of as a rare good part of online communication. Already searching around for Blog Posting Month facts has introduced me to some good blogs.

So there you have it, let's see what happens!