The key is starting

The strength of habits fascinates me. Two years ago, when I was starting on my blog, I easily settled into a routine of producing blog posts every few days. I looked at the world through blog-posting glasses, constantly editing my experiences into what I hoped would be meaningful posts. Even after my Great Shutdown, I maintained folders on my desktop and in my email client for stashing away blog post ideas.


Now that I am back “at it,” and working hard to rebuild my business, the blog posts are starting to reappear. I glanced through the idea folders today and found not much to work with there. Some of the ideas are so cryptic that I can’t even remember what they are. Others are just woefully out of date. No worries, though. Everyday new ideas come to me.

I have found that putting my fingers to the keyboard is the best way to sort out my thoughts. How I wish I had had a computer when I was a student! Often, by the time I am done writing, the whole point of the post is something that had never even crossed my mind when first I sat down to compose. I try very hard to make sure my thoughts and ideas flow one into another, all coming to a neat and reasonable conclusion. Sometimes, that means reworking a post for a long time before it makes any sense, or builds to any sort of point.

The key, though, is simply starting and staying focused on one thing at a time. The end will eventually present itself. I find it works that way with blogging as well as all the other routine tasks that I need to handle throughout the day and week. I have a lot of ideas on how to develop my business, but I need to explore each one individually. By perfecting each one – if that’s even possible – before I jump into the next, I’m hoping I can build a collection of logical, potentially overlapping systems that basically run themselves.

This blog is one of those ideas I’m developing. Another is my facebook business page. I have created it, and it is now running the way I want it to, albeit not the way I thought it would when I first started. I’ll be “launching” it in the next few days, hoping I can get enough people to “like” it so that I can get a “real” name for it, rather than the long, incomprehensible list of characters and numbers it has now. If you’d like to take a glance at it, you can find it at http://on.fb.me/ht2Cek. If you are just geeky enough, you can also use this QR code. Feel free to post any comments, and – dare I ask? – click the little “like” button.

So there it is, the beginning of my business development plan – up and running!

Once begun is half done. -- Plato