finishing blog post on weeknotes

content/posts/2024-08-10-lessons-learnt-weeknotes.md

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 ## Why I started Weeknotes
 
 Weeknotes are like a work journal, a personal journal, a micro-blog and occasionally a brag document all rolled into one.
 
-After reading [this post]() about weeknotes and then following #weeknotes on mastodon for a few weeks I decided that I would give it a go. I've had a go at journaling in its many forms before but it's never really stuck, but I though maybe this time by writing in public it might keep me going. 
+After reading [this post](https://indieweb.org/week_note) about weeknotes and then following #weeknotes on mastodon for a few weeks I decided that I would give it a go. I've had a go at journaling in its many forms before but it's never really stuck, but I though maybe this time by writing in public it act as encouragement to keep me going. 
 
-When I started blogging again this year, I really got the love of it again. Well maybe not so much the writing and editing part but the getting ideas out of my head and into the world part. I also found that the habit of writing was actually good for my creativity - so maybe weeknotes would just be more of that.
+When I started blogging again this year I really got the love of it again. Well maybe not so much the writing and editing part but the getting ideas out of my head and into the world part. I also found that the habit of writing was actually good for my creativity - so maybe weeknotes would just be more of that.
 
 ## What I discovered
 
-* It became self-fulfilling - drove ideas
-* The more I wrote the more I wanted to
+Writing [weeknotes](/weeknotes) was (and still is) a bit of an experiment. I didn't really know if I was going write a few posts, get bored, delete them and move onto something else or whether this was going to become a recurring habit. I'm not really known for keeping a good schedule of blog post writing so I wasn't sure. 
+
+I've now been writing weeknotes every week for over 4 months. I started with a  known template using headings such as: *What I’ve been doing, What I’ve been thinking about, What I've been watching and What I've been reading* as prompts to give me a kickstart in writing. This worked really well and it kept me going week after week, but it also had a unexpected side benefit that it became sort of self-fulfilling. I write my weeknotes every Friday (well sometimes Saturday morning) and at the start I was just looking retrospectively at my week but as time went on I kept thinking more about them and by Tuesday or Wednesday I was thinking about the things I had done that week and if I had enough to write about. So, by writing week notes, it encouraged me to read more, listen to more things, get out of the house occasionally to do things and make sure I was more clear about my tasks for the week at work.
+
+By having a habit of writing every week, it's meant that I've actually wanted to write more not less. I used to struggle writing blog posts because I couldn't really think of topics that I wanted to write about or I would think of huge topic ideas that would take weeks to write and then felt more like a chore. With weeknotes I've found blog post ideas emerging more organically and I now have a backlog of about 16 blogpost ideas to write up. Conversations during the week appear in some form as commentary in a weeknote, with gives me an idea to expand on it as a blog post, which causes more conversations and so the cycle continues. 
+
+I have also found that writing this way has some of the upsides of social media in that it increases creativity because your thinking "that would make a good post" when you're just going about living your life, but without the downsides such as likes and comments and more of the performative nature of it all.
 
 ## What's next
-* Less structure, more content
-* Different parts of the site.
+
+Writing weeknotes certainly isn't perfect, some weeks were much more difficult than others, but I have found now that the original structure I adopted has become a bit limiting and repetitive in a way that I left was limiting my writing. So from week 17 onwards I removed the structure and adopted a slightly more free flowing format similiar to how I write these posts. That isn't to say that what I read, what I listen to and the links to things that I am interested in won't be there, they are just not the main focus on the content any more. I have adopted [/links](/links) and [/now](/now) pages to keep that content on the site so now my weeknotes are much more about my main content of what I have don't and my thoughts and ideas for the week.
+
+So, now I have these blogs at [/posts](/posts) for long-form content, [/weeknotes](/weeknotes) for my weekly brain dumps and my next experiment is [/devlog](/devlog) for posts about various little technical projects that I do on the site. I have a few other post type ideas as well.
+
+Overall the theme and the largest lesson I have learnt from weeknotes is that is encourages me to write more, which increases my productivity and my creativity and helps me connect with people about topics I am interested in.
 
 ## Where to find out more
-* Links
+* https://gilest.org/weeknotes-tips.html
+* https://blog.mattedgar.com/tag/weeknotes/
+* https://amyhupe.co.uk/weeknotes/weeknote-1/