This idea of updating my site as a 28-day project came from having joined a community called The Nook. Started by the folks at Rocky Nook Books as a way to connect those of us who have bought books and supported the authors of Rocky Nook books. I liked the idea of approaching the next 20+ years of my art in a project mindset, so I joined the 28-Day Project course that is part of the community. Artist and author Rich Armstrong is leading us through this and we get together every week to support each other and talk about the ups and downs of our processes. He’s also written a book about projects published by Rocky Nook – The Perfect 100 Day Project.
So, I’m all-in and started this week. Appreciate that the course has no stress, no hard-set rules, just some tips and support for taking on a project and finishing it in 28 days. So far, I think I am well on my way having figured out the Gutenberg Block workflow in my WordPress site and managed to build a workflow and skeleton of a site where I can post to image galleries and write about what it is I’m doing creatively in my life.
The idea of breaking this task up into a project, got me thinking that some of my future photo and artistic work can be done with a project mindset too. So I am planning to create a Projects page where I can organize some of my various photo adventures and my digital artwork into projects. As I finish them, I can write and post images of what came of the project, and share an ongoing series on the site.
Helpful tips to get started
Rick reminded us of some important tips to getting started with a 28-day project and how to manage the process. Here are a few I’ve started with
Tip One: It’s a chapter, not a whole book
Start with small chunks of things I can accomplish in a short amount of time. 20 minutes, and hour, and then string those together into a successful week of project progress. I have pretty much done that this week on my site project, with creation of a few new posts and pages as well as learning more about how to update in Gutenberg blocks.
Tip Two: Remove the friction
Identify things that can slow you down or present roadblocks when working on the project. In my case, I found that the Safari browser does not play well with WordPress Gutenberg editor – the newer editor scheme if you have a WordPress site installed. Which I do. So I switched back to using Chrome for updating the site, both on my desktop and my iPad
Tip Three: Share your progress
Which is what I’m doing here. But I also plan to share a bit in some other communities I belong to.
So good luck with any projects you plan to start in the near future and take you time getting things ready to take on the challenge.