Workflow

This has been a really odd week. First of all, I found a really good looking theme for my website. I tried to do too many things all at once with it, and broke it. It knocked out my entire website. I got the website back, but I couldn’t get the theme to work.

Then, I was messing around with the python on my laptop and ruined my operating system. So, I’ve had to rebuild my entire system. The computer seems to be working better than ever. The website, not so great.

Patience is a good character trait. Take your time. Be careful. Making small waves of progress is a good strategy.

I have finally found a decent theme. Not very colorful, but it does a fairly good job on the blog and the articles.

You’ve got to develop a high performance work flow. Maximize your productivity. Work on being a prolific writer, producing a lot of valuable content.

Its got to be valuable content too. Not junk mail. Produce a lot of stories. Then go back and edit and polish them. I do this all live, so you will see some stories that are not very well written. They are first drafts, which will get better when I go back over them once or twice.

It’s just a pattern I’ve been using, ever since I start building websites in 2008. Its probably not the best strategy and I may work on improving it, but its the way I’ve been writing online.

Right now, I’m writing this story in Kate, and not the website editor, so that is progress. I usually write the articles in Kate and the blog posts in the website editor. I also don’t edit the blog posts very much.

Get your work space set up, so you have a comfortable place to work. Pay attention to the ergonomics of your workspace. Make sure you eat good, healthy, natural food and not junk food. Drink green tea, not soda or even coffee.

Decorate your workspace to reflect the content you are writing about. Keep it neat and clean.

Once you get a decent looking website set up, then focus on producing content. Remember Ken Evoy’s CTPM strategy. Content, Traffic, Presell and then Monetize. Focus on producing a lot of valuable content. You’ve got to shift your focus from setting up your website, the technology part of your business, to the productivity part of your business.

What is your story? You’ve got to work on that every day. Get in the habit of writing about the topic of your website. Or producing videos or podcasts or what ever form of content you like creating.

Produce at least 30 valuable articles. Then, start creating podcasts and videos. Get your photography work flowing. You’ll want to get set up to produce a lot of content using several different ways, such as articles, podcasts and videos. A variety of learning methods works best, so a variety of teaching methods also works best.

You’ll have to figure out how and where to store your content. Podcasts.com is one way to store your podcasts. Inrupt’s Solid may be a good way to store all of your podcasts and videos. Vimeo is a good way to store your videos.

You’ll have the local development environment set up on your computer, connected to the live website on your hosting service via ssh. You’ll write your stories in your text editor and you’ll use Kdenlive to edit the videos you produce. You’ll store them on a service like Vimeo, so they will be accessible all the time, and you’ll embed them in your website.

Use ssh to push the changes you make in your local development environment, up to your production website. Work on developing a very efficient, high performance work flow, to improve your productivity.

Keep working. Figure out how to get all these pieces of your puzzle put together. While the overall framework will be similar for all of us, you will be developing your own custom, holistic home office. Learn how the puzzle pieces fit together. Learn how to hold the tools. Learn how to use them very well.

Work fast, work safely and work smart!