Why?

Hello and welcome to my new blog (well, it is in fact my old blog, but with new content), for those of you that don't know me, I write two blogs already, one on NLP (here) and one on mindfulness, meditation, the slow movement and punk Zen (here). So why write another one? Well, it isn't really a blog as such, nor is it a daily diary. So, what is it?

Well, I am rubbish at the nuisances of written communication, it takes me an extraordinarily large amount of time to even write a simple and short blog entry (I have "issues" about such things, but won't bore you with the details). This means, even though I have half a dozen writing projects on the go (as well as regular articles, blogs and updates to my websites), I find every excuse not to do them.

Which is really starting to get to me now. After faffing around for many years, I really want to just get on with the stuff...

I am full of good intentions of writing, but often start my workday really, really badly. I do everything wrong, I check my email, twitter etc (a big "no, no" according the guru of productivity Tim Ferriss), then often mooch around the internet for an ever lengthening amount of time (not actually looking at anything relevant or useful) before finally settling down to a short burst of work, before distracting myself again with some other nonsense.

I have developed this Pavlovian response to opening a Word document; the very instant I open it my mind goes completely blank and I feel compelled to return to losing myself in the swamp of the internet. No matter how well crafted an idea was when I thought of it in the shower, or walking the dog, or washing up, the minute I come to committing it to paper my mind goes totally blank.

This blog is meant, primarily, to retrain my naughty puppy dog brain into actually thinking of what I want to write when I can actually write it! It is also here to help me improve the subtleties of my writing style; description, grammar, spelling, etc

The concept for this blog comes from an idea I have pinched wholesale from the comedian Richard Herring. On his website he writes a daily "diary" which he calls "warming up" (you can read it here), the purpose of which he explains as:

"The idea sprung up because of writer's block. I have been working hard this year and not really had a break and have been finding it hard to apply myself. This annoys me, because I know that if I just wrote solidly for three or four hours a day then I would never have to get into the mad rushes that I always do whenever a dead-line approaches.

It also makes me wonder about the stuff I could have written if I hadn't been playing Scrabble on my Gameboy"

He writes about anything on his mind for 30 minutes at the start of the day to "warm up" for his writing projects.

When I came across it, I loved the idea, so I thought I would give it a go to see if it drags me from this nadir of laziness and creative block.

Why do it as a blog, rather than just a private journal or word document? Well the reason is 2-fold.

1) By "putting it out there" (and therefore running the risk that someone may actually read it), I will do a better job (and probably stick at it longer) than if I was doing it for myself.

2) I have amassed a reasonable number of readers on my other blogs, and I thought some of them maybe interested in some of things I may ramble on about here (as it will be much broader, and will be about whatever is on my mind at the time of writing). This may of course just be hubris.

It is an experiment, it may be short lived, it may serve me for some time. We will see, please stick around for the ride.

Matt