Tag: My Day-To-Day (Page 4 of 4)

In recent months, I’ve received a few tweets, questions, and emails asking my strategy for how I blog every day. The truth is that I hesitate to answer this question because I think that so much of being able to do so has to do with each of our personalities.

For example, some of the most creative people I know can’t stand schedules, timelines, certain forms of organization, and what not – simply put, they find inspiration in the chaos.

This isn’t to say that I consider myself creative in the sense that many artists and designers are, but I think that we all have some form of creativity within us, but I digress on this point for now.

On the other hand, I’m one of those that tends to be more rigid with my time management. I try to have guardrails setup for social media, I like making lists, I think there’s something to be said about writing every day even if it’s not blogging, and I tend to “go dark” when I really need to focus on a certain task (and this is true both online and offline – just ask my wife!).

But if I had to generalize some tips on how to blog every day regardless of your personality, it would boil down to the following three points.

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For those of us who actually, y’know, like writing and try to write every day, it’s never been tougher to actually settle on a platform on which to do so.

Off the top of my head, the following services are available:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Scriptogram
• Medium
• Tumblr
• Feathers
• Chryp
• Jekyll
• …and many more

But we live in the age of a noisy Internet. Obviously, I love writing as much as the next person, but the problem with many publishing platforms is that they are all designed to be public.

And the thing is, not everything we have to say needs to be shared with everyone.

TL;DR: I think that writing every day is something that many people should do, but not everything we need to write needs to be done so in a public manner. Day One has been one of the best applications that I’ve found that makes it easy to write every day without publishing it for the world to see.

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Periodically, I’ll get questions on how I manage certain parts of my day-to-day workflow, so I’ve been trying to answer each of these questions in My Day-to-Day. Since email is one of those things with which we’re all too familiar, I figured I’d share how I aim for inbox zero.

TL;DR: I believe that inbox zero is a myth – it’s a goal that’s a slippery slope – and it’s more about tools that help you manage the influx of email than it is trying to answer every email by an arbitrary time of day.

But that’s the long version. As always, there’s more to it than that.

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Last week, I wrote about my first Day-To-Day post on Getting Things Done. In the comments, Kevin asked the following question:

Tom, do you schedule time to use Twitter and general interneting or are you able to work with intermittent distractions?

The truth is, I was actually going to include this in the original post, but it was getting a bit long so I thought it made more sense to break it out into a separate post.

TL;DR: I don’t use a Twitter client on my phone, I check in a few times a day, I generally don’t use Facebook, and I use Path for my closest friends and family.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that.

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