A year ago I decided that I wanted to post my thoughts every day. These were meant to be short posts – anywhere between a sentence and a long paragraph – that I would create by voice. It was meant to be a public-facing journal with ideas that could be expanded into longer blog posts. I started thinking about marketing, but it expanded to be so much more. And the voice thing never really worked out.
The daily thing didn’t quite either, but I published 275 posts over a year, which is 75% of the days. I’ll definitely take that.
This turned out to be a very momentous year, but these posts are not about what happened. They are more about what occurred to me while these things were happening, or what I noticed around me. This makes this very personal for me, but it could be somewhat obtuse for others.
The other thing to note is that while these are public facing posts, I haven’t really shared them on social networks. They just sit here on my blog. I didn’t have a good, automatic way to share them. It also turned out that I didn’t always write them every day. I might write 3 or 4 at a time, either to catch up or to push ahead. I did keep a list of topics, so they really are all about things I encountered on a daily basis.
So shortly after starting these daily posts we had an election that did not go the way I expected. Nor the way almost anyone I knew expected. I was pretty shaken by that. I tried not to obsess over that, as we all had to get on with our lives.
It was a big travel year for me, too. I went to Hawaii, which was my 50th US state. My international travel included Iceland, Germany and the Republic of Georgia. Each of these places influenced my daily posts around the time I was there, but they were not about the trips themselves. I’ve been a bit behind in writing up my travels and sharing photos here on my blog.
Professionally, I started a new job, so my exposure to the day to day exploits of marketing became more client based. And I have a commute two days a week, so I see a lot of billboards and things on the side of the road.
Personally, I started a relationship, which was really my first since my divorce 10 years ago. But it has also ended, so I’m dealing with that for the first time as adult too.
Posts like this are usually about the lessons learned from doing a year-long project like this. Something like 5 lessons I learned by publishing a short post nearly every day for a year. I don’t have any grand takeaways and I don’t really want to write that post. I wasn’t doing this for traffic. I wasn’t doing it to expand my audience. I was really just doing it for me.
There was no pressure on me about the daily thing. If I missed a few days due to travel or work, sometimes I went back and filled in the holes. Sometimes I didn’t.
Are there ideas here that could become longer blog posts? Of course there are. Are there trends that I might discover upon review of all the posts, either in the marketing world or in my own preferences? Probably. I would have to read all of the posts now to do that discovery. I’m not sure that that is something I want to do right now.
For now, I think I will just keep observing the world around me – both the marketing side of things and the side of the road side of things – and writing about them in short posts. And know that some day something might come from all of this.
