It’s traditional at this time of year to look back over the last 12 months, so here a few thoughts about what happened with blogging (and other public writing), indeed PKM generally, and what went astray.
The year started quite well with a reasonable flow of posts, helped somewhat by retaking Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery course.
However from mid-year onwards there was a complete slump in public posting. In hindsight the key things that have impacted this have been:
- Reductions in available time at key points of the year due the mechanics of how we juggle our jobs in this household. These in turn led to hiatuses in not just blogging but overall PKM activity which have been hard to recover from
- General busyness at work, with the balance of activity moving to more tactical projects and a lot of context-switching, reducing the time available for all forms of knowledge nurture
- A reduction in willpower to carve out time for learning and writing from mid-year onwards, or to use bits of downtime for those tasks. I’m pretty clear where that is coming from, and some of it I can address, whereas other factors I need to get better at accepting so they lose their power to sap my energy.
- the PKM work I have done has tended to focus on sense-making and learning around internal work challenges. This is coherent with the goal I set myself, but the missing bit is finding the ways to extract the share-able knowledge and to share that online.
Some pointers for myself:
- be more observant of my mental energy level, and build in breaks before willpower is completely drained
- observe that standing to-do item in my daily note template to do some exercise, however modest
- look for ways to make rolling notes that can be publicly shared even if the learning is around work-related issues - waiting to the end to create a shareable version means it never gets done
- use that regular diary slot for Seek-Sense-Share to do just that instead of using it to do more work tasks
- stop comparing my online note-making with others
