This is my planned 30-day check-in on this post.

So far, my goal is met and my outcome is achieved; I have consistently posted once a week since I made that commitment. Go me!

As we follow a standard “project-management-like” playbook here, what’s the next step? Let’s do an after action review.

• Was it successful?
• What did I do differently?
• Why was it successful; what was the difference this time that made it successful?
• How can we roll those lessons learned into the future?

I can tell you right now, the main thing that made it successful was this: identifying the friction, then learning to use some automation tools that are available to eliminate that friction.

This might take a moment to explain. In previous years, I would schedule time once a week to write, and during that time I would take the 30-90 minutes to author and post a blog entry. In general, this works. At any one time I have 10-20 half-finished blog articles sitting around (even if it is just a couple sentences or ideas), so it is either finishing one of them, or authoring a new one if the idea has struck me. Sometimes, the ideas come at me when I’m driving or exercising or something and so instead of writing I will verbally narrative my blog post, run the recording through a voice-to-text translator (such as this one), and then clean up that text (maybe with this). But even with all these tools and tactics, frequently “life would get in the way” and I would not take the time to actually go finish out the polishing and submit the post. There’s the friction!

Well, when I started to look back in more detail I realized something. Namely that the nature of my writing is “bursty”. I would go a couple weeks not wanting to write at all then suddenly get a burst of creativity or inspiration and author four of five blog posts. But what I would not be consistent with is taking the 15 minutes once a week to actually go submit that post.

And then I found a feature in this software, which is actually a similar feature that I use all the time…scheduled posting! I use this frequently in emails and chat messages as well. If I think of something I want to ask someone, or remind myself to do, I will set up a scheduled message to send. The same works with blog posts. If I get motivated and write five blog posts in one sitting then instead of leaving them in draft and requiring myself to go post I will just schedule them to post in the weeks ahead.

In hindsight this is a very simple feature and an obvious solution. But that’s my point. Frequently there are simple and straightforward technology-based or automation-based ways to reduce the friction. But sometimes you have to take that time to stop for a moment, identify the actual cause of the friction, and then go solve it. Seems obvious, and yet observation shows us that there are many places where this could be done to improve things.