Task 1/2 – Blogging Experience

Introduction

Hello everyone, in today’s blog I am going to meditate on my blog journey experience, giving everyone a view from my perspective.

Description

I’ve always been a technician, my favorite subject was always related to technology, programming languages, databases, etc. For more than 10 years that was my focus, the technical aspects of Information. But recently I’ve been hired for a more strategic, business, management position and one of the first things I did after my admission was to contact an old professor of mine that works in this field and ask him for advice.

He told me many things, but one of the important things he said is that I need to learn how to write, he said your activities will involve mostly writing documents, reports, projects, etc.

Now I am doing my master’s and I it seems to me that the is a lot of emphasis on writing, starting from blogs until papers. I’ve written 4 blog posts now.

Feelings

I am enjoying a lot the experience of blogging; I’ve always wanted to write posts on LinkedIn and contribute to the IT community. I thought about so many topics to write but whenever I sat down to write I never knew where to start or how to express what I wanted to.

One thing that I’ve always liked about writing code was the feeling of being in “flow”, of total engagement with the activity, and when I sat down to write documents, I could never get that same feeling.

But now that I start writing blogs, I can feel glimpses of that. Sometimes I become so focus on the writing, on expressing my thoughts that I cannot feel the time passing, it just like when I write code.

But of course, still most of the times I feel stuck, I don’t know what to write and I stop a bit. These moments make me feel powerless and incompetent. They are different than the difficult moments when I write code. When I find a difficult problem to solve in code, I become more engaged but when writing I feel like quitting.

Evaluation

The good thing about writing blog posts Is that it provides me with the experience of expressing my thoughts in writing in an informal way. I can write the way I speak and think while I learn how to convey my thoughts in writing.

Probably the reason why I could never get the same feeling writing documents that I get when I write code, is because of the level of skill on the activity. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pointed out in the book “Flow: the psychologic of Optimal Experience”, flow is achieved when the level of challenge presented by a task matches the level of skill one possesses to complete it (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008).

The bad thing is that I may develop bad habits, and when the time comes to write papers which must be written in a formal, academic manner I will still be writing as if I were writing to the public.

Analysis

I think I should not be chasing “flow”, I should be focusing on writing consistently, applying the techniques that the professors teach. Chasing flow will probably make me want to give up whenever I don’t get it or make me want do shortcuts.

There is a tendency in me of wanting to grab someone’s else writing and copying but I know that is a problem. Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson said imitating someone prevents you from growing and blocks your creativity (Emerson, 1841).

One good technique I learned in the course is the “Six Minute of Writing”. This technique teaches that in the beginning just let your mind go, focus on writing without filters without examining it and leave that organization for later. This is helping me cope with my need to write perfectly which is a tendency I discovered in me in another lecture in the course.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I can see that writing blogs is going to help me become a better writer, and in turn make me increase my performance in my job. As I increase my writing skills it will became more enjoyable to write.

Action Plan

Because I can see the importance of writing, and the improvements I make each time I write I will write more. I am going to plan of writing 1 blog post per week, but because I also understand that a big part of knowing how to write is reading a lot of books, I am going to read 30 minutes and write a summary of what I’ve read in my own words.

I believe that practice alone done in 3 months is going to improv my writing skills as well as my knowledge.