I rarely feel like I have enough time to write, and I never feel like the blog pieces I post are as polished as I would like. But I often let that hold me back from posting. Right now, I probably have at least ten blog posts I’ve started but never finished because I want to go back and edit them. While I believe it is important to strive for quality work, I also think there are times when it might be better to act and act quickly rather than crawl at a snail’s pace and get very little done. Besides, I often find that the posts I tell myself I will polish later are the ones I never finish.
So I am going to try an experiment here. For the next thirty days, I am going to give myself a time limit for each post. I can only have twenty minutes to get my thoughts down and then I hit the Publish button. While this might end with a lot of terrible posts and scattered thoughts, my desire for setting this goal is to learn how to become more concise and also learn how to get better at doing (as opposed to overthinking, as is my tendency with everything in my life).
I’ve already been at the screen for fourteen minutes with this post.
This afternoon, I was feeling pretty discouraged about my goal to start a new blog and YouTube channel focused on lessons I’ve learned from books. The idea is to write a blog and post a video for each book I read, giving a brief overview of the book and then hitting on 7-10 lessons that really resonated with me.
But as I said, I also feel like I have very little time to devote to this new project, and to this blog as well. I am a stay-at-home mom with a son who is almost two and a daughter who is eight months. I am still often getting up multiple times a night to feed my daughter. I am always busy and always tired and it feels like I rarely have a moment to myself (I always used to hear parents joke that they couldn’t even have a moment’s peace in the bathroom and now I know this to be true).
While I am busy, I also realize that some of my struggle to find time stems from my lack of planning and focus. None of us can do everything but we can all make time for our top few priorities. I am struggling to learn how to do this, but I know it is possible.
This new goal of taking just twenty minutes a day to write each of my next thirty blog posts is part of my plan to make this blog a priority and stop making excuses for why I can’t write. Who doesn’t have twenty minutes a day to spare?
