Posting something almost daily at adammclane.com is a challenge. So I thought it’d be fun to write about that process. Perhaps this will provide an insight into my daily life or maybe it’ll even help someone figure out a new process for them?
Three main sources of my daily post
- I wake up and have something on my mind to write about.
- Pre-planned posts.
- Rants.
Typically, I write in the morning. I leave for work at 8:00 AM and I often start writing at about 6:30 AM. Most days I am literally pressing the publish button, hopping in the shower, and dashing off to work!
1. For stuff I write in the morning.
These are my journal posts. They tend to ramble more. These are also posts that I mostly write because I have to or the thought will take over my day. It’s hard to explain that, but I think I’ve disciplined myself to wake up thinking about something. There’s definitely a spiritual discipline side to it as well. I’m going on 6 years of daily public blogging… so it’s probably as much a habit as a discipline. But I really dig getting up early to write. And the pressure of having to finish by a certain time helps. (Donald Miller has a great post about using a timer to blog)
2. For stuff I pre-plan.
I’m a doodler. And if you’ve spent time with me you’ve probably seen me listen to something, or finish a conversation, and pull out my iPhone to take notes. (I also carry a notebook for this and use Post-its for the same purpose.) I use Evernote to organize that mess into a list. I have one ever-edited note called “blog posts” which is simply a list of things I want to blog about at some point. Some of those items on the list have partial posts that match… these are things I doodle while in meetings, sitting in church, on the trolley, or in a plane. Some of them are just main ideas, some of them are fully edited posts, and some are pictures of things I’ve doodled in my notebook.
Sidenote: Almost every morning I look at that list and decide do I want to write about something on the list or something on my mind? If I chose to write something on my list instead of what is on my mind, I always make sure to capture a couple sentences of that thing have on my mind for a later post.
3. Rants
Rants are a healthy part of the blogger diet. The part of ranting that I’ve tried to eliminate from my blogging diet is the immediate rant. (That’s blogger junk food!) I used to allow something to fire me up and then I’d write a scathing response. Bam, done. My new self-imposed rule is that I don’t publish a rant right away. Instead, I prefer to allow it to sit in Evernote for a while and add it to my list of things to blog about. Then, when I’ve had some time to reflect, I can decide when to publish the rant as well as how I want to edit it. Some of my most popular posts of all time started as rants, fermented, and got re-edited to something else. But a good rant is fun and I let ’em fly on occasion.
Other types of posts
There are a couple of genres of blog posts I didn’t include here. These are my more spontaneous posts. Book reviews, family updates, and video posts. There’s not much pre-planning or deep thought that goes into them. Which is why I typically publish them on weekends or when I’m on the road. And the truth about those posts is that they are more meaningful to me than they are to the reader.
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