I’ve written this entire blog, past and future, in my head a dozen times over the last decade.  I’ve mentally written millions of words and crystallized my perspective on the topics this blog will cover – but take a guess at what I forgot to do.  Write it all down!  What some would consider the easy part.  Reason?  Lack of time. Or so I’d been telling myself for years.

Everyone has probably heard these phrases:

• Winners make the time!
• If you don’t have the time, you don’t want it badly enough.

Naturally I agree with those statements in theory, but it’s always a lot harder to turn them into practice.  How do you make the time when there are a thousand other important things pulling at your attention?  The “answer” to that question is bigger than this one post – it’s the focus of this blog – so for now I’m going to cover the “rule set” I’ve followed for sitting down and writing this blog.  These rules have worked well for the (very) short amount of time I’ve been employing them, and I expect they’re just the start of a longer list over time.  They cover writing as an activity but could also be extended to just about any creative activity – simply replace the word writing with painting, dancing, graphic design, or whatever else you’d like to focus on.

Before jumping in however, it’s important that you’ve already made the commitment to yourself that whatever it is you want to invest in creatively is important to you.  Do you consider it an important part of your core values or mission?  Is it one of your top 3 focus areas?  Do you have both long-term and short-term goals relating to this activity and have you written them down?  If you’ve answered no to any of those questions, you have to ask yourself if you’re actually going to “make the time” for something that doesn’t align with who you ultimately want to be.  Do you “want it badly enough”?  Think about it before taking the next step.

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This post is part of the Project Management: Starting a Blog series.  Read the first part.

In the first part of this series I covered an overview of using project management principles for life projects, building out a project plan, and deciding on a name and logo for your blog.  Now I’ll talk about setting up WordPress hosting and hooking up Windows Live Writer.  By the end of this post you should have most of the high-level tools you’d need to start a blog yourself – and while that isn’t the focus of this blog necessarily, I do want to make sure that all this stuff I’ve learned over the last couple months doesn’t go to waste.  If nothing else I can point friends here when they ask me how to do some of this!

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This post is part of the Project Management: Starting a Blog series.  Read the second part.

Project management is a lost art and much needed science outside of corporate America.  Many people spend most of their working lives planning projects for a living, but leave that toolbox in the office when they jet for home.  However, life is a series of projects – some of them so complex they would put to shame anything you’d encounter at work – and the same tactics that have been proven over the centuries to work for managing vast, interdependent projects like the Roman Aqueducts also work for cleaning out the basement on a Sunday afternoon.

Project management doesn’t sound sexy though, does it?  I’d bet you immediately imagined some geek with a clipboard, sitting in a cubicle, staring at a GANTT chart in Microsoft Project.  But just work with me for a moment: what if the same process that works for that geek would work for you as well?  Would it be worth a shot?  What if learning some ”boring” project management skills helps you get that job you’ve always wanted, keeps you sane while moving across the country, or helps you to relax over your upcoming wedding?

Add little to little and there will be a big pile.  Ovid 43 BCE – 17 CE

Over time I plan to cover project management in more detail and relate the strategies and tactics to focus and to life (an amorphous, ambiguous blob lacking structure).  I strongly believe that solid project management skills can help you lose weight, get that degree you abandoned, start your own business, or… simply start a blog like I’m about to describe.

For now, let’s just examine how this blog got off the ground…

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From LifeHacker:

Add-on utility WriteSpace turns Microsoft Word 2007 into a distraction-free writing environment with the push of a button—making productive writing easy.

For the past few months I’ve been looking for the ideal way to write drafts without distraction, especially given my somewhat unique writing situation (a big burst on Sunday).  My two favorite tools for word processing/blogging on Windows are Word and Windows Live Writer (a fantastic application!) but to-date I haven’t been able to go completely distraction-free in those programs.  With WriteSpace I now can – without sacrificing the power of Word.

This is how it looks and works after you install it.

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