I’m setting up a weekly blog routine

How to be an Original is 4 months old now. Three months seems to be the critical time frame to find out whether you’re a blogger or not. A lot of people stop at that point in time, and those that don’t seem to have a blogger’s dip with a dry spell in inspiration for posts. I have had that dry spell, but I’m not done blogging Not by a long shot, I like it way too much and I’ve learned so much while blogging, that I plan to continue for a long time.

During that dry spell, I had the feeling that I needed a routine in my blogging, that I was lacking structure. So I’ve been working on a weekly routine for How to be an Original for a couple of weeks now, well not really working on it, but it changed a little bit everytime. This is stuff that needs to mature over time. Here’s the routine:

Productive Monday
On Mondays at the start of the new week, I’ll be focusing on (personal) productivity. I use GTD as a system, but I adapt it to my own needs. I’ll be writing about the concepts, my experiences, tools I use and so on.

I’ll also write about simplifying, as I think that’s the big secret behind being super productive. Focus on the bare essentials and get them done, it’s like taking the speedway to accomplish your goals.

Living my Legend Tuesday
The name is inspired by the book The Alchemist, written by Paulo Coelho. Living my legend is about discovering what exactly is my legend and putting it down in words, pictures or whatever form is appropriate. It’s also about recognizing the signs that are helping me in realizing it and about changing habits that are holding me back.

This is a very personal day and writing about it weekly will definitely speed up my (inner) journey to living my legend, and apply the lessons from the Alchemist.

NLP Wednesday
Wednesday is all about NLP. I’m currently in training to be NLP Practitioner, but my interest in NLP goes back to 2000. I’ll use this day to explain concepts of NLP, or simply to explore concepts of NLP as part of learning. Explaining is an excellent form of learning, and discussing it with the readers will deepen both my and your understanding even further.

Or I’ll just pick out some words and ventilate my appreciation or frustration, like I did before in Do or do not, there is not try and The tyranny of must.

Inspirational Thursday
On Thursday I’m posting about inspiration. The posts can be in any form, and I’ll post stories, pictures, book reviews, interviews, etc.

Fun and Freedom Friday
This is my playground. On Friday anything goes. This is where my previous articles on lateral riddles and brain training would go. But this essentially is the day where I can post whatever I feel like sharing or what made an impression on me or what made me laugh.

Sketchcast Saturday
This is an entirely new section. Recently I discovered sketchcasts, a different kind of podcasts. Sketchcasts are invented by Richard Ziade of basement.org.

Sketchcast are like a session where someone explains a concept using a whiteboard to illustrate the concept as they speak. This is a great addition to blogging in my opinion and I’m going to use it to explain concepts that are best explained while drawing pictures or while changing the pictures. Sketchcasts will be around 5 minutes max.

Weekly Review Sunday
This day I’ll be posting weekly reviews. I started that this month already for my Early Bird habit change, and I’m going to expand it with different sections.

The weekly review is part of the GTD system, and a very important one. I’ve been having a hard time integrating it in my routine, so I’m going to integrate it in the weekly blogcycle. I’m not going to put it up in detail, but I’ll dedicate a short section in the post to how the weekly review went.

And third, I’m going to report some figures on a weekly basis on blog performance. They’re mostly for myself, but as a blogger I always like to read how other bloggers are performing with their blog and what their plans are. So I’ll post it for bloggers like me who like to read that stuff.

So the weekly review will start of with three sections (I might be adding more in the future):

• Looking back on the habit change
• Report of GTD weekly review
• Blog performance

Applying the routine
There’s a section for every day, and I plan to post an article every day. I think that’s going to be my next monthly challenge . I will stick to the topic of the day and I’ll be changing the categories a little to comply with this new routine, so you may notice changes in there.

Using this structure is more for me, than for you, however I sure hope it will benefit your experience and expectations for the better as well. I’m very interested to know what you think of this new setup.