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Week 1

Posted by
Zach Moss
Published
  • After nearly 5 years of managing a blog, I’ve decided to try weeknotes because I’ve struggled with what Giles Turnbull called ‘publishing momentum’.
A photo of a slide at a recent training course about what constitutes good ‘open working’. It says that “good open working makes it easier for busy people to pay attention to your work, by making it easier for them to digest smaller chunks, shared more often.”

A photo from some ‘working in the open’ training — I highly recommend

  • The slide above from his Giles’ 2-day training course which I went on last week. It was very very good, and seeing this slide kind of convinced me that writing less, more often is something I need to try.
  • I’m hoping weeknotes are an easy way for me to do that, but let’s see.
  • My main reason for going was to try and get some tips for what good ‘working in the open’ looks like for the small charity I work for.
  • The test of whether a training course has been useful for me is if I come away with a list of things to immediately try on my return to work.
  • I’m currently looking at a list of these 8 things in my notebook so I think I can say it was one of the better training courses I’ve been on. All the more impressive as I think it’s a new course?
  • So here are the 8 things I wrote down…
  1. Experiment with a new sign-off / editing strategy —a combination of ‘bad first drafts’ and ‘verbal editing’
  2. Update the internal guide to our blog — I’m going to use this nice example from the Co-op Digital team as a starting point
  3. Work on ‘publishing momentum’ — try weeknotes or gentle deadlines. I hate deadlines hence this weeknote!
  4. Create a folder for out ‘blog artefacts’ — I’ve setup a Dropbox folder to store things like screenshots, photos (see above!), diagrams, links, video clips etc. This makes it easier to ‘show the thing’.
  5. Re-think how I write my own blog posts — use the principle of ‘bad first drafts’. Another eureka moment for me — I always try and write the perfect blog post on my first go. Turns out there is another way.
  6. Publish the 5 minute blog I wrote during the training course. Kind of linked to the above — Giles challenged us to write something in 5 mins, then leave it overnight to stew and come back to it the next day. I quite liked mine so I’ll publish it soon.
  7. Setup a ‘blog bucket’ for ideas. I actually had a version of this for myself, but I’m going to open it up for other staff so it becomes something we ‘own’ together.
  8. Not an action, but a line from Giles which stuck with me: The blog is your brain. Twitter is the announcement mechanism. I love this. It matches what I’ve been thinking more and more recently, that I like Twitter threads less and less, and blog posts more and more.