Sunday, November 30, 2008

NaBloPoMo '08 Postmortem

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I received one of those self-help feel good-emails from a friend and one of the "twelve commandments" for happiness was "Don't hold postmortems".  What?  For a person who analyzes everything to death, that's like saying knock me out cold right now so I can stop thinking.  Every work project that I've been involved with has had huge post-mortems. Usually they are quite difficult and painful as everyone knows that most of the same mistakes will be made again.  There is no way a project would be approved if the real budget and schedule were presented up front.  All project managers underestimate the amount of roadblocks and challenges that a large project faces.  But to completely forgo a postmortem?  Everyone needs an opportunity to get things off their chests even if it doesn't necessarily produce a positive result for the future. I had to dig up the email and share the picture:



For NaBloPoMo '08, I was completely obsessed with getting posts ready for this month starting even in October.  I was afraid to be left high and dry over the weekends and during my business trip, so I would crank out five posts at a time and have them published in the future.  However, this did nothing for keeping things current.  Like I didn't even have a proper Thanksgiving post like I did last year.  But I loved seeing the posts neatly lined up to be posted at 12:05AM every day.  It was total control and organizational heaven.  And it was great to finally get some of those old drafts completed (some were more than a year old). But of course, since the creative juices got flowing, I ended up with many more drafts than I did when I started the month.  At least the blog isn't going dead anytime soon.  Since I have so many posts written beforehand, I will probably have posts for the first week of December while we're on vacation. BTW, even this post was written on November 26 (and I'm on vacation right now). So congrats to me on another NaBloPoMo in the bag!

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