So, it’s been about 89 days since my last post on Thoughtwrestling.

I’ve been focusing on other things during the past few months and almost all of my writing has been done offline.

All’s well.  I’ve been spending a lot less time online during these 89 days but I’m still finding the time to do lots of reading and writing.

I’m not sure what the publication schedule or frequency for Thoughtwrestling will be going forward.  The time away from the blog has allowed me to reflect and ask the question “why” a lot of times.  Also, “what” and “how” have been frequent topics of internal conversation.

At any rate, I hope all’s well with you and thanks for reading.

There’s two kinds of plate spinning in this world.

There’s this kind (click on the link to the left if you don’t see the video below):

Then there’s the other kind of plate spinning, which is what I’m going to talk about in this post.  It’s the whole business of setting, managing and changing priorities.  It’s about how you choose to spend your time.

Time is the great equalizer as they say:  we’re all limited by the same  number of hours available to us in each day.  As much as I dislike our North American culture’s obsession with efficiency and getting as much as you can out of as little as possible, it comes from the finite nature of our time and attention.  It is what it is.

In my case, I have tried a lot of things during the first year of Thoughtwrestling’s life:

• Starting the blog
• Recruiting a fine group of contributors
• Trying to develop a daily publishing schedule combining my own material plus contributor’s material and guest posts
• Guest posting and other promotional activities
• Starting a mailing list and newsletter
• Creating a simple Facebook Page for the blog and trying to put something unique out there at least once per week
• Trying to start a non-fiction version of NaNoWriMo (GloManWriMo)
• Creating 11 for 11 (11 resolutions for 2011)
• Temporarily having a regular contributor beat at a different blog
• Some free consulting sessions and, um, not so successful attempts at paid consulting (which, to be fair, I really wasn’t approaching properly)
• Reader outreach
• Writing and publishing an eBook with audio content
• Trying to educate myself more about creativity, problem solving, etc.
• EDIT:  trying out a Twitter chat (#twchat)

Somewhere along the way I over-extended myself:

image by Jenni66

and things weren’t as fun as they were in the beginning.  It’s all been a valuable learning experience but, frankly, my plate spinning powers have their limits.  I’m not happy how it’s been affecting the quality of my writing on this blog.

A number of things have worked well and others went OK.  One or two things went horribly wrong.  A few things were just bad, poorly designed and executed ideas.  And that’s OK, that’s one effective (although not efficient) way to learn.

The point of writing all of this is not to whine or complain.  A few months ago it dawned on me that I’m a middle-aged man (what?  It’s not 1990 anymore?) and I take responsibility for my decisions.  However, this preamble is a way to talk about a few things that I’m not actually going to do, or keep doing.  I’m going to try to drop a few plates as gracefully as possible.  If you hear a small crash or some swearing in the background… sorry, that was a plate.

In no specific order, here’s a few plates that are going to stop spinning:

11 for 11:  this was an idea which would have gone much better if I had prepared for it properly.  Although it has a nice ring to it, 11 major areas of change in one year (even though a couple of them were kind of duplicates of each other) is just not something that I’m prepared to commit to.  This is the last update I’m going to do for it.  Oh, and March wasn’t a great month for sticking to 11 for 11.  Bye bye, 11 for 11.

GloManWriMo:  I have about 30 pages of writing languishing from November’s attempt at creating a manifesto.  Neat idea at the time, but I’ve discovered that I’m not really a manifesto guy.  It would have worked better if I’d kept it as a general non-fiction project instead of trying to shoehorn in the manifesto label.  I may reuse parts of that writing, but I’m not going to publish a manifesto this year.  I’m not going to retry something like this in November, either.  Adios, GloManWriMo.

Contributors and the group blog concept: the people who have contributed to Thoughtwrestling are all top notch.  They’re also busy folks.  Pretty much all of them have had to devote their time to important stuff:  their own lives and livelihoods.  This is quite understandable.  I’m particularly grateful that Kat French and Susan Murphy were able to spend so much time on wonderful regular contributions.  The writing from Ian M. Rountree, Scott Marshall, Bill Wren, Rebecca Leaman and other contributors/posters were great stuff as well.  Although I hope they will contribute more posts in the future as time and interest permit, for all intents and purposes I will be the only regular contributor going forward.  I think we’re all OK with that.

Mailing list/newsletter: I won’t be maintaining a regular newsletter for the foreseeable future.

Publishing frequency: I plan to maintain a consistent 2 days/week posting schedule, with the occasional extra post when it makes sense to do so.

Subject matter: I’m going to continue to play around our existing favorite subjects like creativity, psychology, problem solving, getting things done, and so on.  Everything on this blog needs to connect back to these core areas in some fashion.  Not sports, gossip, politics or whiz-bang tech talk… unless there’s a true connection back to the core topics… and I ain’t gonna go looking for those.

I want to focus on the main reason for having this website:  to discuss, educate, inform and stimulate your mind through high quality content.  I fear that that plate’s spin has been getting a bit wobbly of late and I need to put some energy back into that.

I guess this post really should have been the first anniversary post, but these are some changes that I had to accept at first.  I don’t like the idea of stopping or quitting things.  On the other hand, I’m not fond of breaking dishes either.

Erm, well, I think you know what I’m really trying to say here…

Anyway, thanks for continuing to read. Here’s to a renewed focus on providing you with thought provoking ideas and useful information to help you do great stuff. If there’s one thing that I believe MORE than ever after one year of Thoughtwrestling, it’s that creative thinking is quite possibly the key skill anyone has to have to survive and thrive in the 21st century.  And that’s the core of what we’ll keep talking about here.

P. S.  Continued thanks to Elizabeth for being a great sounding board and offering wise counsel.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the brain lately.

Steven Pinker’s article on consciousness

My Stroke of Insight – fascinating book by neuroanatomist and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor

Your Creative Brain – sort of reviewed here

I think this all pertains to the themes and topics discussed here at Thoughtwrestling… I’m still trying to sort it out though.

Today’s post is short and sweet.  I want you to go visit some other blogs today.

The blogs that I would like you to visit today are listed in our blogroll.  Thoughtwrestling‘s blogroll contains links to a bunch of great blogs that I admire and that I read regularly.  Think of it as a recommended resources section where you can find other good stuff to read.

Many of you know what a blogroll is but I think that both the purpose and importance of the blogroll have been buried by the rise of search engines like Google.  Before the World Wide Web was so thoroughly indexed, both blogs and their blogrolls provided important navigation aids to help both the reader and the website owner find interesting stuff.

Blogrolls are also ways to help support like-minded publishers and friends by directing readers to their websites.

So today I’d encourage you to check out the websites that we’ve listed on our blogroll.  Note:  if you are reading this post either by E-Mail or within your RSS reader, you will need to visit the Thoughtwrestling website to see the blogroll.  It’s in the right hand sidebar and you’ll probably have to scroll down a screen or two to see it.  It’s labeled with the title Blogroll so it should be easy enough to find.

If you are a blogger, why don’t you take a moment and direct your readers to your blogroll today?

Image by Vivianna_love

Seasons greetings, folks!  We’re going to go a little quiet during the next week or so but we will be publishing a post or two between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Best wishes to your and yours during this holiday season and here’s to a great 2011!

Regards,

Mark Dykeman