I have just returned from a 12 day absence from my business. One week at a conference, the second with family in another state. I only wrote once during this absence. In my case this was already calculated. I knew I wasn’t going to write much and chose not to try to build up a series of articles before leaving.

My version of daily writing and which is why I used ~tildes~ in the title is not actually daily. I decided up front to include the writing in my normal business day. The biggest challenge is that I rarely have a planned topic or even a set of planned topics in my back pocket. I originally thought my TDD series would be easy to just pull out of my back pocket, but I’m finding that it goes very slow when I am both writing an article and doing TDD at the same time. My goal is to be able to write short articles daily in which I already have working professional knowledge. My TDD series did not lend itself well to this.

The articles that do tend to work well are based on daily Access work I am doing and writing about bugs or features that I am developing in real world documentation.

My audience: Currently, I am writing to myself in terms of being an Access developer. The articles are geared towards Access developers acting in a professional capacity. Ideally this will be beneficial to my Access community (you the reader). Time will tell I guess.

The act of daily writing means I don’t have to be concerned with pacing. It is very easy to have a todo each day (whether it gets done or not) than it is to be surprised once a week or so by the article requirement appearing on my todo list. It does keep me aware of a need for articles which I hoped would trigger my brain into producing more ideas. This hasn’t been entirely the case.

Additionally, I am considering whether this is the most beneficial way to help you as my audience. Does my experience help you? I think it could and it should, but perhaps focusing more on developing my own tools and discussing how I use them (like versioning, our Access JumpStart template, our HAL (Halder consulting Access Library, or other 3rd party tools I use like RubberDuck VBA, MZ-Tools, and Access Find and Replace for example. I definitely think that trying to find a more specific person or archeype to talk to would be helpful. What do you think? Hit reply and let me know or try to work through the complex labryinth of creating a user on my blog to comment.