Achievement Unlocked!

Back at the start of November I promised myself to complete the NaBloPoMo challenge of writing a blog post every day for the whole month. This is the last of the daily posts so I have been looking back over the other 29 this morning. I have to say there are some that I really like and some that I don't care for much. But I wrote them and met my personal challenge and that is what is important here. 

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the results. I enjoyed writing most of the posts and hope others enjoyed reading them. There are a few, perhaps 10 out of the 30, where to me at least, it is obvious that I was too tired and/or distracted to be writing anything for public consumption. That's a risk you take when you sit down at a computer after spending 12-14 hours trying to attend to the needs of 30+ people and deal with staff issues as well. Not always fun but it's a living. That was also one of my biggest excuses to myself for not working more on my writing in the past. "I'm too busy", "It's my day off but I"m too tired", well, I can't tell myself that anymore.

A few times the writing was colored by technical frustrations, as noted in “Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By”. Yes it’s true, in the year 2012 there are still places of business who do not use computers for almost everything. Our office staff has them but we don’t use electronic medical records and such. Therefore the nursing stations do not have computers at all. The building does have wi-fi available to the residents but it is quite unreliable. You can be working along on your laptop and suddenly get a message that (despite showing a full internet connection) you can no longer access the internet. I have no idea why and we don’t have an IT person.

I feel I should point out here that I would not be writing on my blog during work hours. I live over an hour away from where I work and they have generously allowed me to stay over in an empty room between my shifts. Any writing done would be after work hours.

Several times I wrote from restaurants with wi-fi access. Of course my laptop has very limited battery life and the thought process can be difficult when you are constantly checking the power icon instead of focusing on what you are writing. Throw in a few noisy kids and even louder teens and well, I threw in the white flag.

Now I am not making excuses, I knew they weren’t great when I wrote them. The point of my doing this however was not to spend the month writing award winning material. It was an exercise in discipline. It was to show myself that I could manage to find the time to write no matter what was going on around me. That’s why there is an editing function. I can get the thoughts down, make the effort and without an absolute deadline to post, I can always go back and improve what was written in less than ideal circumstances. Basically, I have no more excuses! I may not post daily now but I will write daily so that when I do post, it will be because I feel it's ready.

So, final outcome? Achievement unlocked! Step 1 has been completed.