Focus Focus Focus

I have been working on creating blog posts for about a year now.  I know for sure that I have a hard time writing one blog post about one thing.  There is an open casting call in my feverish little mind that helps itself to my short attention span at the keyboard.  When I write for work, my supervisor points out that my work is all over the place.  And when I go back and read my stuff over, I am not happy with the tangents my work takes from one sentence to the next.  The comment is that it does not look like college-level writing. It's not lost on me. I confess to myself that Ronald Regan was president the last time I had to write in college. So, other than some minor technical writing and journaling, I have not been doing any college-level writing.

It's a discipline. I am working on writing one article about one topic.  I am learning quicker now a few tricks.  First, Drafts.  I have overly high expectations that my brilliant thoughts will flow onto the screen, page after page of coherent prose.  Effortless creationism is what I would call it if I had to make it a religion.  My blog post admin site is called ghost.  When I start a blog post, it's called a draft.  I have been going right from draft to posting in one shot.  The work seems sloppy and short to me.  I am in a hurry to produce a finished product.  While I do want to hit one post-a-week goal, I want my work to be worth the effort to read.  So, drafts can mean two things to me. One is that I can be working on more than one blog post topic at a time.  I can split off my tangents into projects for another week.  Secondly,  I can come back and look at my existing draft and gasp and clutch my pearls, cut it up, change it up, or start over.  

I ask myself why I am reluctant to edit or work on more than one thing at a time.  Well, I am lazy, obviously.  Also, I am learning how to use software over notebooks to write.  In college, I worked on my papers in little notebooks while I was at work, stocking grocery shelves overnight. So I was reluctant to write any more than I needed to hit my word count and due date.  In the future-verse, I am learning to use software to make my work easier to expand and edit.  For example, I wrote a few days on this week's post and realized it was not going anywhere well. So here I am, taking my thoughts into a new draft to explain why I am not focused in a paper notebook that would have been a mess to figure out.

I will end here with a nod to my time constraints.  My mantra for next week is going to be "Somethings got to give." What do you miss the opportunity to do because you get sidetracked into doing something else? So what do I need to give up to write more is the quick question here for me.