So, this is the last day of November and that also means the end of my commitment to spend a couple of hours each day on writing (mostly for my blog but also for other things). I’ve already written about the lessons I’ve learned about writing through this exercise but I’ve also achieved some things along the way that I think are worth recording.

My writing seems to have improved considerably. I’ve found some styles and approaches that suit me and by all accounts my blogging has never been better. My mother recently urged me to write a book, though I really have nothing I want to publish and distribute to the world at large — that is, nothing that I’m not already publishing and distributing to the world at large right here. Improving my writing was my main goal in taking on this commitment and I’m happy with how I’ve progressed.

Engagement with my blog has increased. I work for a company that measures engagement with blog content via social media, so naturally I’ve been using our analytics product to measure engagement and our Facebook app to publish my content to and collect metrics from the lovely blue walled garden. Although by some standards it may be very small, my modest blog has received a great deal more engagement this month than it has in the last couple of months. In particular, I’ve seen more of my posts receive at least one comment. I love hearing from all of you and I hope you’ll continue reading my posts and sharing them with others in the future.

I really enjoyed it. I couldn’t get myself to blog much before because I rarely felt like I had anything worth publishing. But by committing to writing something everyday, I’ve realized that I had a lot more to write about than I thought, I just needed to put it all out there. For the first time in a long time, I really enjoyed blogging this month because I was doing it for my own sake and not as part of some “personal brand” or whatever marketing yourself to other people on the Internet gets called these days. I feel like what has come out of this month is a lot more genuine and I hope it shows.

What happens to this blog now? Well, it was difficult to squeeze it into every single day. Sometimes I’d be up past midnight writing a post and I’d back-date it to the previous day to keep it in sequence. I really shouldn’t do that anymore but at the same time I don’t want to go back to updating only very rarely. I’ll be looking for a happy medium. What this exercise has given me is momentum; I still have a couple more ideas for blog posts and I’m sure that once I write those there will be more. In short, I probably won’t update every day but expect to see new content considerably more often.

Thank you for reading.