A Blog A Day- An Experiement 1/31

The One About Austin Kleon On The Sketchnote Army Podcast

I was listening to one of the latest Sketchnote Army Podcast’s with Austin Kleon (see below) and a large section of the podcast was talking about creating a ritual, a daily output. The idea that writing begets writing. Creativity begets creativity. The podcast really resonated with me. I enjoyed the part where he started talking about his process, using a small moleskin to jot down ideas, and then sitting down and writing in a diary, then moving on to doing a daily blog post. This system is actually taken from David Sadaris.

​This part is at minute 26:25 if you want to fast forward to that specific section.

A year and a half ago I started bullet journaling. It is something that I think I was predisposed to do. I had always wanted to be a person with a daily diary, but instead of paragraphs about my day I was more of a list maker and planner. I would collect journals and then not put anything in them. And fnally, while later in my career as a teacher, I started getting hard bound moleskin journals that I would write notes in and throw in post-it notes and odd collections of things. I had also dabbled with art journaling from time to time.

A bullet journal takes really all of those things and puts it into a system for you. A part of that system is developing your layouts monthly, weekly, and daily. A part of my monthly layouts, for almost the entire last year at least, has been to write a line a day. It started as a line of gratitude but in general it seems to be a small statement about what happened that day. For the most part it is kept positive, but I don’t call it my monthly gratitude journal anymore. I feel like doing a blog a day is an extension of that “line a day” obviously just a lot longer.

Small bits and pieces over time turn into something big.

Another part of my bullet journal is this idea that I have these plans for items to include monthly, weekly, and daily. As if in my incredibly busy life, I can’t figure out what my schedule is going to be that day I can turn to page 17 and look for items to add. (See the latest version on this in my current bullet journal below). One you thing you will notice is that I plan, on a regular basis, to write a blog post. As you can see from my time stamps I haven’t written a blog post in months. So clearly this idea of wanting to generate ideas and keep writing is a big topic for me.

Another small problem that I have with all this is that for the last year I have been working very hard at developing my teams website. If you haven’t seen it you should check it out, www.bsdfutureready.com you will notice that the website has a very similar theme as my website here. But for the last year I have been putting all of my time and energy and content into that website. Sometimes I will cross post, but when I was thinking about doing this challenge this website was the only place that I felt comfortable.

The team’s website does have a blog, and I have been pushing my team to write blog posts all year. I can’t get my boss to mandiate that the team writes blog posts, the post have to come organically from them, which is as it should be. At this point however, there is really only two or three people that are writing those blog posts. I would love for there to be a daily post on that site as well. I can’t control the team’s contribution but I can control mine. So I figure the more I write on this blog, the more I might come up with ideas that can be cross-posted? I think I just made up a verb.

Regardless, as Austin Kleon says in the podcast above, one of the biggest compliments he can get is when someone tells him they were inspired to create something. He has done that for me with this podcast. I too would like to develop a writing system, or at the very least a writing routine where I am blogging everyday- regardless of if someone is reading it. So here we go, blog 1/31 is done!