Two days have gone by without a 28 days of writing post. I could just walk away but my goal isn’t necessarily to blog every day, but get in a blogging habit. So, this is my chance to try again.

Dean Shareski’s blogging anniversary post was kind of what prompted me not to quit. He has a great clip from Seth Godin about the act of blogging that’s worth a view. Like Dean, I am writing for myself, a place to reflect, to clarify, to understand. I don’t completely ignore the audience since it is a public piece of writing and I try to make some wider connections to help them do their own thinking.

So, what happened the last two days? I could say “life” but the bigger problem is not having a routine for the blogging. It goes on the to do list but since it doesn’t have to be done, it tends to get pushed to the edges of the day and by 8:30 PM at night, I’m tired and uninspired. I would find myself listlessly surfing Feedly to find something to write about besides reading and books, the topic of several of the recent posts.*

Two lessons here:

1. Routines are important for me and blogging needs to find its place. Mornings seem to be the best time for me. And, I really want to be commenting on other blog posts so that will also be the time to great the day via social media and Feedly. It’s a bit ironic: I only recently gave up my morning pages habit of more than a decade. The long form stream of consciousness writing had grown stale. So, it should be easy to replace that with a blog entry. But, I’ve gotten used to doing other things, mostly reading or piddling on the Internet.

2. I need to get more serious about developing a parking lot for ideas. I have saved a few articles to Evernote but am thinking that a few minutes in the afternoon to just brainstorm things that have happened that day that might be worthy of comment along with emails or articles that have come my way would help prime the pump for the morning sessions so I can get right to the writing without heading out to the network for ideas.

I don’t think I’m going to try to get caught up. Just get started on the routine: I’m blogging in the morning and then this afternoon, I’ll curl up with Feedly and Twitter and think about tomorrow.

*I don’t think those posts are bad but they aren’t really the focus of this blog, which is supposed to be more about education and technology. I blog about my reading at my personal blog.