Blapril: Lessons Learned Week
Prior Lessons
It’s that time in Blaugust Blapril where we discuss anything we’ve possibly learned. According to Bel, this week’s focus is “Lessons Learned”.
The goal as always with Blaugust and now Blapril is to revitalize the blogging community and ignite those fires fresh for another year of posting. As such this is a marathon that we are running and not a sprint, so we continue forward a little bit into the next month for folks to have that cooldown lap and talk about the things that they learned during the month. This could be a discussion of your own personal journey, or focused on some of the things that you learned from the community. The idea being to keep it going just a little bit longer so that maybe the habit of posting regularly sticks.
First, I want to thank Bel for putting this together. I appreciate it so very much, even if I seem to fall into the void after almost every one. This time, though, in combination with antidepressants and being in a better place (even if only by a smidge) fiscally and physically, I’ll be sticking around, or at least that is my intention.
I wanted to take a look back at what I’ve discussed in prior years as lessons I’ve learned. Let’s begin by jumping back to 2015, and moving up from there.
- Blaugust Conquerer (2015): This was back when I was over on Blogger, believe it or not. I pretty much just recapped the year and didn’t discuss what I may or may not have learned, but at the same time, earlier Blaugust events were a bit more challenge-based rather than the focus of continuing the trend of blogging.
- Blaugust (2016): I participated in 2016, but didn’t have a post at the end of it. Mainly because my life was falling apart at the time, and I split with my ex-husband less than a month after August ended. So we’ll cut some slack, there.
- Blaugust (2017): I didn’t participate at all this year, mainly because I was trying to piece my life back together. I’m a bit bummed that I didn’t post this year, because there’s huge gaps I’m missing in my own mind, and blog posts, regardless of what they’re about, seem to jigger my memory.
- Blaugust 2018: Post Mortem: What did I learn in 2018? Well, some things I already knew about myself, but were very much brought into focus during the event.
- Blaugust 2019 Postmortem: 2019 found me with similar conclusions as 2018, but also surprisingly some more than I initially thought I’d learned.
2020 Lessons
My thoughts for 2020 are pretty much the same as 2019.
- Blogging every day is a valiant goal, but is not something I can manage full-time. I do plan to try to continue a three days per week schedule, but we shall see how that turns out as the months continue.
- On the days I blogged, I was less likely to journal in my bujo (bullet journal). Which has kind of been a detriment to me this month with the way the world is right now. My mental health has suffered some from not having quality journaling and self-reflection time.
- When life gets overwhelming, my content creation endeavors take a nose-dive. Ugh, I’m dragging myself. Because yes, this continues to be the case in all of my content creation endeavors, including adult work.
- I miss creating content that is more in-depth rather than more personalized. While I didn’t write anything that was more in-depth during Blapril this year, I do still miss writing article-like content, and I have a bit planned as evergreen material in the coming months (book reviews, thoughts on gaming types and gamification, etc.). I’m also trying to figure out how to extend this to my sex blog to attempt even a two posts a week schedule.
- Numbers seem to be more of a distraction than a help. This continues to be the case. I appreciate how much they help some folks, but I very much scroll past that kind of chat in both Discord, and when it shows up in blog posts. This is not to say that folks aren’t allowed to post it, or should stop. It’s more my own self-worth and depression screwing with me if I focus on that stuff. So I politely scroll past and congratulate folks on their success.
- Content Calendar is QUEEN. I am not sure why I held out on using one for so long. A huge shout out to Tessa for helping me to see the light! The content calendar has helped me so much in both catching up on posts and getting ahead on posts. It’s also helped me to better see what kind of drafts I have available to write, and what evergreen topics I can pre-schedule and move around. I’m a very visual person with certain things, and being able to see my month of blogs at a glance, but know that I still have the opportunity to respond to things going around the blogosphere, or tackle things I may have experienced while nerding, and move out previously-scheduled posts has helped me so very much in renewing my enjoyment for writing, and has even sparked some inspiration.