My framework for how to address specific points about blogging improvement focuses on seven keys. I can’t think of a better time to post this than on 07/07/07 at 7:07 (thanks for the idea, Lorelle!). In this post, I want to discuss—naturally—the seventh key to better blogging: productivity. The sixth key is tools, so when I say productivity, I don’t specifically mean efficient use of tools, although there’s some overlap between tools and productivity, for sure.
When I say productivity as it relates to blogging, I’m really talking about personal productivity and how output is achieved. This is more along the lines of discipline combined with blog management methods. Discipline has to come from somewhere. It comes from the motives that drive a blogger. Understand yourself, understand what drives you and motivates you, and you will have no problem being disciplined. You will have no problem being productive.
Productivity, in a more literal sense, has to do with production itself, or the action of producing, just like the word conductivity has to do with how energy is conducted or transferred from one thing to another. Productivity means something more than just volume. Productivity is that magical combination of quantity and quality together. If we want to think about tools as part of the science of blogging, then we can think about productivity as part of the art of blogging.
The best endeavors of humanity are always a combination of art and science—even the pursuits of art and science themselves! There are a million hucksters on the internet who want to sell you on some science they’ve “figured out” after “years of not making it big.” They’ve got the formula, and all you have to do buy it. But it doesn’t work that way. The old clichés are true: there is no magic formula, the magic comes from within you. You can see this in the work of Steve Jobs, Heather Armstrong, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, and many others. None of these people bought somebody else’s secret formula. Each one of them has a clear, distinct personality that clearly shows through in all that they do, and that is probably the best way I can show you that it is the combination of art and science that wins at the end of the day, because it generates productivity effortlessly, almost as an afterthought. These people are driven, they are motivated, and they know what it is that drives and motivates them. This is why none of them care about productivity (at least, not in the way productivity gets hawked online). They don’t need to. They’re too busy being themselves!
The key to being productive is not to try and be productive… it is to understand and be yourself. If a “productivity guru” said that, he would be laughed off the stage, because productivity gurus make their money by selling you formulas—science without the art. Don’t try to be productive! Try to be yourself. Expressing yourself is the art. Productivity naturally follows.
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