Thread by @fortelabs

1/ Well, I finally took the plunge and made a @NotionHQ page, after armchair commenting from the sidelines for the past year. I made a workflow for my Praxis blog publication process, and seeing this has led to some interesting realizations

@NotionHQ 2/ I have at any given time about 40 posts at some stage of publication, from a mere idea all the way to an announcement going out through my email list and social media. I always had some vague idea of this, but seeing it all in one place for the first time is shocking

@NotionHQ 3/ This really clarifies for me my philosophy of blogging:

1) the most important thing about a blog is that it's active (because ppl won't pay attention if it seems dead and outdated, but more importantly, because it provides a stream of constant feedback)

@NotionHQ 4/ 2) the only way to keep up a steady stream of published posts while remaining sane (that I know of) is to funnel your entire life through your blog. Make it a weekly update on everything you're reading, learning, watching, doing, working on, attending, experiencing, etc.

@NotionHQ 5/ You can see this in this board. I have a diverse mix of announcements, thought pieces, exploratory posts, meta-analysis or summary posts, recordings of interviews, videos, personal stories, walkthroughs, etc. all jumbled together, like a newsfeed of learning that I control

@NotionHQ 6/ 3) Don't force any one post all the way from idea to publication in one go. Only work on what you feel like, when you feel like it, even if that means it takes months for a single post to make it to completion

@NotionHQ 7/ 4) You can afford to take your time with any single post, only IF you have a lot of posts in progress at once, since one or the other will regularly pay off. This also ensures you need little motivation or self-discipline

@NotionHQ 8/ For any publication tasks that are boring, you can either outsource them to an assistant, or batch process them, which at least means they won't take much time and you won't need to do it often

@NotionHQ 8/ Your "newsfeed of learning" is the central place where all your work takes place, so even if you promote posts on other sites, communities, blogs, and social media, all links lead back to the source, where you capture email addresses

@NotionHQ 9/ Your blog presents your work in a chronological timeline, which is a good default. But you can also use tags and categories to present subsets of the stream according to any criteria. For ex, all my posts related to BASB: praxis.fortelabs.co/category/basb/

@NotionHQ 10/ When anyone visits your blog, it looks like you're absolutely killing it since there's such a constant stream of posts. But it's just because you're funneling everything you do into a single stream, instead of dispersing it all across the internet

@NotionHQ 11/ This takes some capacity to *notice* when a piece of content is being created that could be re-posted to your blog: a PDF, a Q&A, some FAQs, a template, a video recording, audio recording, event announcement or recap, book you read, course you took, great convo you had, etc.

@NotionHQ 12/ Everyone is doing a constant stream of these things, but it's scattered and mostly hidden. Your blog is where they become explicit and public, like a portfolio for anyone to see

@NotionHQ 13/ I have to admit, having a really effective and reliable digital note-taking system is essential for this to work. You have to be able to capture any idea or note, from any source, at any time, and trust that it will find its way to one of the 40 posts you have in progress

@NotionHQ 14/ You also need the ability to pick up any post, even if you haven't touched it in a year, and be making progress within minutes. Otherwise, the startup costs will be too great, and you never will

@NotionHQ 14/ But what I notice looking at this workflow is that THIS IS MY LIFE. This is not only my publication workflow, but also my research workflow, my product dev't roadmap, my personal growth journey, my interest graph, my resume/portfolio, my idea pipeline. It is everything

@NotionHQ 15/ Basically, I am a blog production supervisor, which is monetized by the sale of various spinoffs from the blog, from online courses to ebooks to speaking and workshops. But the magic happens in the writing, which is public so everyone can be a part of it