While in Recovery Mode: Learning anyway

The past couple days have been about recovering in many ways. The one most pertinent to this blog is the ability to type and communicate stories, ideas, and reflections. My wrist got overused and typing is now a limited activity. The choice between writing creatively versus mandatory work related writing means I don’t get to type up for this blog like I want to. However, today, I’m back for a short entry and I’ll explain more as the blog progresses.

While in recovery

I used to make the mistake of ‘quitting’ a certain activity if I couldn’t do it in it’s entirety. That’s like the story I heard of someone not doing their taxes because their pencils weren’t all properly sharpened. Yeah, many have seen the ad on tv showing this story in play.

Learn anyway is the tip someone gave me. There may not be much interest in pushing my wrist to type up large amounts of text, however, I have taken the time I usually dedicate to writing to learn more about the art of writing and also blogging. Yeah, that art is real. How one Formats a post and present a post matters just as much as the content written inside the post. If it looks bad, no one is going to spend time reading it.

Are you constantly learning?

I took some time to move about Google and see what others were doing to up their skills. Even took a book out on the lovely Kindle platform to understand what professional authors do to raise the quality of their work.

In this day and age, it is important to always increase your skills. Without the constant learning, you’re apt to get left behind. The pace of innovation will continue to increase and the cost of not keeping up will also increase. That is, of course, unless you’re fortunate to be in an industry that doesn’t not need change and also in a line of work where change is bad.

What have I learned?

It is easy to spend a lot of time learning a ton of things. I focused my energy on presentation of the blog. If my readers don’t enjoy the presentation, then I won’t get to keep them long. The biggest lesson is understanding how to shortcut the formating process. Here is a short list of things I ran into.

• Markdown
• Pagination
• Compilation of text

In the case of my writing tool of choice, Scrivener, I realized I was spending so much time formating the text in the WordPress editor that I was doubling my time spent writing. I had to write the content. Then copy and past. Then format it to make it look like I want. With Markdown, I’m aware that this will cut down the time dramatically. This post is the first test of that. If it worked… then that really saves me a ton of time.

Because I write so long, not necessarily on this blog… on others that I write for, a super long scroll is not cool. Having the text fit across several shorter pages makes much better sense for those who read on the go on their phones.

Compilation is one of the features on Scrivener that is all about how the body of text comes together into a single piece of work. Sometimes you need an extra set of eyes to review just certain pieces of a long piece. The tool allows me to just put together those pieces in one sitting and sent that out instead of trying to copy and paste just what I want…adjusting the format.. Then sending it out. (yes.. I skipped the exporting aspect… this is not a how-to post today lol)