What Happened
I wrote 20 posts for this blog, including 18 field notes. I think it is time to evaluate the process before I will continue.
What Surprised Me?
The pace of writing turned out to be extremely high. I produced the 18 field notes in two mornings, during some downtime while doing other things.
Ideas for new field notes kept appearing. With the help of AI, those ideas matured and turned into actual blog posts. The friction between a conceptual idea and a finished post ready for publication all but disappeared. That experience itself became the source of several new field notes.
I decided to maintain a publishing cadence of one post per day to avoid burning out. This pace of writing may not be sustainable, and I want to avoid creating pressure to write merely to maintain the cadence.
The publishing cadence also creates time between writing a post and committing to it. I can still revise or retract a scheduled post before publication if new insights emerge.
What Worked Well?
The process of generating ideas, developing them through dialogue and turning them into publishable posts worked remarkably well.
The title and description I chose for the blog at the beginning also still seem to fit the material I have created so far. The subjects have expanded, but they remain within the territory of quality and delivery transformations.
What Did Not Work Well?
I set up this WordPress blog from scratch, added an “About Marcel” page and immediately started writing posts. I paid very little attention to the layout, theme or functionality of the site.
I have also not started using categories and tags. The site still uses the default theme, which may not be the most inspiring choice, and it contains links and elements that I do not use and probably never will.
The content has developed much faster than the structure around it.
What Will I Change?
Besides continuing to develop new field notes, I will clean up the site. I will add categories and tags, evaluate alternative themes and remove unused links and elements.
As the number of field notes grows, I may also create overview pages that connect related posts. These could make the emerging themes more visible and provide other ways into the material beyond the chronological list and the “About Marcel” page.
For now, I will continue with the next set of 20 posts and then conduct another retrospective.
The first cycle has shown that generating material is not currently the main challenge. The next challenge is to give that material enough structure, distance and editorial attention as the blog develops.