Phil Bowell

Back at work again after a week off due to my back. Spent a lot of the week reading and automating. Workflow is amazing.

I’ve a feeling it might be time to move on from Fever to another RSS engine. Any recommendations for me?

I guess may blog challenge has kind of failed. Stupid depression.

Absolute disaster. Brewed a coffee and then saw then time, might not be time to enjoy it. Tasting notes include pineapple and I could smell it as I ground the beans.

Sometimes a day hits you when things that are normally easy to do become the hardest things. I mean simple things like getting out of bed, going downstairs and making a coffee. That's the nature of depression.

When it happens you have to find ways of getting through because giving in to it can be crippling. Giving in can be the start of a downward spiral, a spiral you don't want to be in and that can take a long time to get out of. That's a place you don't want to go. Instead you have to find a way to push through, to stop the down from taking over. What that looks like is the tricky part, but for everyone there is way of doing it.

The desire to tinker is strong in this one.

I have this problem when it comes to my blog. The more I start to post to it, the more I want to tinker. The more active I am on the site, the more I notice little things I don’t like and want to fix. The more I post to it, the more I want all my internet posting to originate on it. It’s like an illness.

It’s something I’ve always struggled with, and I confess it’s a side to blogging that I enjoy. The trouble is, the more I tinker the less I post. The more I craft the design, the less time I spend writing.

It's a battle, although one I'm sure I do not face alone. It's not just the battle of a blogger, it's a battle of a designer. Most of the tinkering I do is design related, little details and quirks in my theme which I notice but very few others will. I also know from experience, that I will get to the point where I've caught the little tweaks I need to and they will be fixed. Then it's just a case of resisting the bigger things I'd like to do. Or at least knocking off the major ones first, like finding a way to post photos here and on Instagram, displaying them in a way I'm happy with. The key though, is to keep the posts flowing. Keep to my challenge of posting everyday, and getting through the tinkering stage until I get to the point where I'm just posting each day and all my published content originates here.

Or is it just a pipe dream? Should I just keep posting and ignore the little bits that nag?

But I know I can't just ignore the nagging. I'm a designer, I like details and its in my nature to keep refining bits until they're gone. To keep crafting until they as close to perfect as can be, it's just important to keep the perspective, to keep in mind that perfect doesn't exist. It's about getting things to good enough whilst keeping on posting each day and building momentum so that the writing takes over the tinkering and becomes a creative outlet in its own right.

After a good day celebrating the wedding of two friends yesterday, today calls for some serious introverting.

At the start of last week I set myself the challenge to blog everyday between then and the end of the year. Yesterday I didn't manage to post to this site, in some people's eyes I've failed the challenge already. Maybe I have, but it's not going to stop me carrying on.

These types of challenges are great to do, they add an extra bit of impetus to get going on something you want to do. A little bit of healthy competition goes a long way. But yesterday life happened, two friends got married and the day was rightly taken up celebrating that. There simply wasn't time in the day to sit down and write a post for this site, it was an exception to the norm and that's ok. I realised this early on and gave myself permission to have a day off.

A few years ago had I set myself this challenge I would've let it defeat me. The chain would've been broken and I would've let the day off turn into two, three or four days, before giving it one last effort and then stopping it. Over the last year and a half I've learnt that sometimes it's ok to give myself permission to say, it's just not going to happen today. As long as it doesn't turn into a regular occurrence that's perfectly OK, I just pick up where I left off the next day.

It's been an important lesson for me to learn, perfect is unattainable and being somewhat of a perfectionist it's a difficult thing to accept. Now in the context of this challenge, had I realised earlier in the week when I started it, I'd have written an extra post in the week so I had one in the bag and didn't break the chain. In the context of real everyday life, it's a far more important lesson to learn. I've had to learn how to give myself permission to say this is ok, this is good enough and I'm ok with putting it out there.

Starting to gain some interest in the Rio Olympics, might be something to do with the track cycling finally starting. Nothing like the prospect of some British success to pique your interest!

Got so frustrated with my iPhone I spent the morning resetting and restoring it from backup. All of a sudden I have 5GB of space on it!