Ouch.
However, she was absolutely correct.
While my creative routine for blog writing and publishing has some variation relative to when and how I write posts, the number of rounds of proofreading, and how far in advance everything is ready, I try to keep the variation to a minimum. Typically, I complete nearly everything for a post the weekend before it runs. Through forced experimentation, however, my creative routine will flex to writing a blog post closer to the publishing deadline than I would like, say the afternoon or evening before the blog post runs.
Because of various factors, however, last Friday’s post did not come to life with a creative routine I ever care to repeat.
The previous weekend was consumed with finishing a new presentation for Tuesday and a two-day client session at week’s end. While several posts were ready to go, Friday’s blog post was a question mark. In fact, I had resolved potentially to skip a new Friday Brainzooming blog post if it meant compromising something else for the client session.
Thursday night on the road in Phoenix, I had a few blog topic ideas jotted down. After a late evening refining our approach for Friday’s client Brainzooming session, I returned to my hotel room deciding to write the most developed blog topic – the one on harsh questions to ask yourself. I sat in bed typing the post directly into Wordpress (which I rarely do) and fell asleep, only to wake up at 1:30 am, with the computer still on and the blog post half-written.
Putting the computer to the side, I crashed until 4 a.m. Pacific time. I decided that even with missing the typical publishing time for the Brainzooming blog (just before 3 a.m. Pacific time), there was still time to finish the post for the email publishing deadline around 5 a.m. I thankfully discovered most of the blog post saved as a draft in Wordpress. I finished the post in a hurry, gave it a quick glance, inserted a photo, tagged it, hit publish, and turned my attention to getting ready for the day’s strategy session.
Only after the email published did I re-read the post, finding a number of typos. I immediately fixed them in the online version, but by then it was too late to correct what our regular email subscribers received.
Arghhhhh!
For as much as I advocate adapting your creative routine, being okay with mistakes, and learning from things that go wrong, Friday’s experience of abandoning my creative routine was not the way to do it.
I appreciated a reader taking the time to call me out on it, however, because it prompted me to write this post to let you know what happened and to say I’m sorry the reader experience I strive for dipped WAY too low last Friday. True, it is not the end of the world, but if a similar situation develops again where I'd have to move forward with completely abandoning my creative routine, I will likely decide simply to wait a day to publish and save us all some frustration. - Mike Brown
