My latest this week post is numbered #64. Which is a long time to have kept that up; I did not think I would be so successful at it. I especially did not think that I would see other people using this format to reflect on their life!
What I love about it:
- It’s a commitment to 30-60 minutes every weekend to think about what the previous week has been like. This helps me think about what I have achieved and what was great about it.
- It helps me collect my pictures (I take a lot of pictures, I tweet most of them, but this feels more permanent).
- I share a lot of content on Twitter and this is also a place to capture things that I found interesting.
- It reminds me to update more static pages, like my speaking or elsewhere pages.
- I do it purely for me and expected people to skip over it, but periodically someone tells me they appreciated some aspect about it.
My process:
- Start a post with the same headings as usual, from memory.
- Fill in “published”.
- Take a first pass at “work” and “life”.
- Re-read last week’s post and reflect on what has happened since.
- Fill in things I realise as a result.
- Scroll back through Twitter to where the links from last week end off.
- Manually cut and paste tweets over. I could automate this, but I value seeing what I thought was important, and often tweets without links capture things that I add to the longer form sections.
- Fill in any “achievements” like things published not on my blog, or conference announcements, as I find them.
- Add media (if I’ve been reading a lot I have to look this up on my Kindle).
- Fill in places I went with the help of my Foursquare history.