It’s October 1, and you know what that means! It’s officially time for Blogtober. All month, I’m planning to put up a new post every day, just because I can. If you want to participate too, don’t forget to check out my coming soon post!
I talked about this in the previous post too, but I have a little theme this year: Third time’s the charm. I’ve tried a few of these challenges since 2020, and I’ve always ended up feeling disappointed with how I did, so this time around, my goals will be a little different.
My goals for Blogtober
1. Practice showing myself some grace.
I can be incredibly hard on myself when it comes to my writing and my work because I get stuck on the idea that if it isn’t absolutely perfect in every way, then I failed. I think that’s something I’ve always struggled with, but it’s become a lot more obvious in the last few months with some of the work I’ve been doing, and it’s something that I want to work on both for myself and for the lovely souls on my team at work.
After all, it’s one thing to put those unreasonable expectations on myself. It’s not fair to let them trickle over onto anyone else, no matter how inadvertently.
2. Put the fun back in writing.
In my original Blogtober challenge, I talked about how one of my biggest struggles is writing fatigue, usually brought on by just how much I write on a daily basis.
My work has shifted a little in the last few years, and though I still probably write around 2,000 words per day (half of what I was back then), I also review and proof everything my team works on too, which more than makes up the difference. My Grammarly plug-in regularly praises me for “writing” around 30,000 words in a week, though I know full well that I only write a fraction of that.
I still keep up writing games and challenges for my little team of writers at work now, passing on the joy from the days when my boss and I were the only two writers, so I’m bringing the same spirit here to the blog to get things feeling nice and fresh again.
3. Do my best.
Maybe this is just the tactical side of my marketing brain, but I’ve been watching what happens when I do challenges like this and trying to spot where things go off the rails so I can work on it.
The big thing seems to be that I fall off after about two or three weeks of writing, which tells me that I still struggle with it feeling like something I have to do, and that I still rely on bursts of creativity rather than the more sustainable solution I was hoping to find in my first year of doing Blogtober.
So this year, I’m going to focus on doing my best, whatever that ends up looking like for me, and hopefully outperforming the last few attempts, even if that just ends up giving me a higher bar to clear next year.
YOUR TURN
