June 2011 | Ian M Rountree

Last July, Justin Kownacki and I offered the Read it All Week challenge – to see what kind of effect forcing yourself to work through everything in your RSS reader queue would have on your personal media production, on your work habits, and on your life in general.

The question is simple; does consuming all of this media actually give you the benefits you think it does?

This year, in light of the fact that I’ve gained about 50 blogs over my pre-Read It All number last year, I’m going to suggest the same a little early. Starting now, I’m on an impromptu #ReadItAll experiment.

Want to join in? Thought you’d never ask!

Here are the guidelines for #ReadItAll Week:

Preparation:

Mark All As Read right now – This isn’t a week for catching up, it’s a week for staying on task, or getting ahead, with your reading.
Set aside some time every day to read. Maybe it’s an hour before work; maybe during lunch; maybe just before bed. Maybe all of these.
Assess which physical media you’ll be including in this experiment. Magazines, newspapers, news television – whatever you include normally, be sure to add that to your planned list.
Catalog your current content commitments. Even if its just a number, write out the amount of media you’re planning to attempt to keep up with. For example, my week will consist of [x] blogs in Google Reader, [x] hours of news television/radio, [x] podcasts and [x] print media.
Mark the time, if you like, by reposting these guidelines to your blog if you have one. Letting people in on the process is a big part of any experiment.

During The Week:

Actually read everything. Getting to “Reader Zero” is a noble task, but it requires that you actuallyread everything to assess its value.
Resist the urge to subscribe to new blogs, just for this week. Bookmark new sources for review later, by all means, but consider that adding the commitment to new sources in mid-experiment changes the nature of the work.
Take notes, if it helps. By all means, keep a running log of the experiment – I’ll be using #ReadItAll on Twitter to mark my observations.

Wrap-Up (Post experiment):

Examine the effects of the week on your reading. Did you keep up? Did you fall behind?

Mark your experiences with a follow-up post on Monday, June 20th.

And, of course, let people know! Tell us how the challenge worked out, how much you found that was useful, how many bookmarks you set. Now’s your chance to talk about your research process – or even just the experience of media consumption – with that critical voice you always avoid.

Welcome. And, good luck.

I deleted fifteen drafts from my blog this morning. Some of them, I’ve been keeping around for nearly six months. Clearly, I would never write them.

It’s liberating, every now and then, to ditch the expectational debt of having too many unfinished drafts and move on. I don’t think we give ourselves enough chances to do that.

Drafts have their place, certainly. Setting things in motion, marking down ideas – these are good practices. However, living perpetually from drafts seems to make reacting to live events hard. How can we talk about news, if our post for today is already in the queue, and we’re unwilling to shuffle the queue back because we have a schedule?

In doing the editorial and SEO work for Hard Refresh, I’m now finding that working a draft from start to finish effectively takes practice. Nic and I are getting a decent queue of articles there, but we do still have some drafts – they’re not bad things by nature, but they do suck up a lot of cycles unintentionally. Being able to call something finished shortly after starting it is important; letting your brain stew on a half-formed idea while at the same time trying to keep the original idea’s form is not.

When considering your editorial calendar, drafts can save your life. Or, they can make you completely bonkers because your half-finished ideas starve the rest of your creative process.

Some practices I’ve found to help when dealing with drafts:

Keep a list of topic ideas separate from your in-blog drafts.
Only create drafts when you have well-formed ideas, but don’t have time to write.
Write the finished article within a set period of time, or delete the draft itself.
Be willing to push the schedule of drafted posts for reactive blogging.
Mark posts in a series where appropriate, especially if you can title them as such.

Doing this for my project blogs has helped keep me significantly less stressed over publishing. While it’s led to less writing here, it’s certainly led to better writing there – and better writing is what the job’s all about.

How do you keep your sanity without completely ignoring the idea of a draft?

Archives for June 2011

Here are the guidelines for #ReadItAll Week:

I deleted fifteen drafts from my blog this morning. Some of them, I’ve been keeping around for nearly six months. Clearly, I would never write them.