Problems are nothing new to man. From times immemorial, he has faced problems and found ingenious ways to deal with them. To tackle the shortage of time, he is now facing, man discovered multitasking - the act of performing many jobs at the same time. The idea of multitasking gained popularity with the advent of the computer. The computers could multitask, and by multitasking the performance of computers increased dramatically. If the computer could do it, so could he, man thought.

For the past few years, the general belief has been that a man who can multitask is more efficient than the man who can’t. So, most of us have been trying to master the art of multitasking. I am no exception.

However, multitasking is good, if it is good at all, only for tasks that are routine and not important. Most of the activities that human beings perform, especially creative ones, require complete attention. And if that attention wanders then either the performance of the activity is hampered, or the activity is performed sub-optimally.

Let us take the example of writing a blog post. When you are writing a post, you are constantly thinking of ways to make the post better. You are looking for the right words, for the right image that you could use with your post. It takes sometime to get into the thinking mode. If in the middle of it, you receive a message from a chat friend, your mind is distracted. After you are done with the chat, you have to get into the “writing post” mode allover again. The post that you could have written in 30 minutes, takes many hours, and sometimes it never gets written.

Not only that, the quality of the post also gets affected by the continuous distractions that we face while we are multitasking.

In the earlier days, I tried hard to master the art of multitasking,and, to some extent, I was successful. But, now, I feel that there are times when it is best not to multitask.There are times when it is better to focus on one thing at a time. You could actually get more done that way.

Do you multitask? Do you think it affects you in a negative way?

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The first task of the “31 days to build a better blog challenge” is to write an elevator pitch for your blog. The idea of having an elevator pitch for your blog is a good one, because many a times people will come up to you and ask, ” What is your blog about?”

If you don’t have an effective answer to the question, then any interest the person might have had in your blog will vanish into thin air. And we definitely do not want that to happen. Do we?

I started this blog to replace my blogger blog. But, I did not realise that I had grown to love that blog, and even after starting this blog, I could not stop posting on that blog. So, now I had two blogs on my hands, and both had similar content. Something needed to be changed.

So, I decided that this blog was going to have a niche. After going through a list of things that I could blog about, I decided to use this blog to focus on writing, and related issues.

Thus, was born, the tag line of this blog : Writing, among Other Things.

This tag line  is also my elevator pitch.

What is your elevator pitch?

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Recently I was going through Brian Clark’s blog, and I came across an article with an interesting title: How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer. After going through the article, I was far from convinced  that Twitter can help you in improving your writing. In fact, not too many days ago, I was thinking that too much tweeting can actually hurt your writing.

Twitter gives you only 140 characters to say what is on your mind. With a 140 character limit, there is not a lot that you can say, even if you are trying to be concise. If you want to convey anything meaningful, you need more space than that. If you don’t have more space, what do you do: You try to find a shorter way to say what you have to say.

There are two ways in which you can do that.

The first way: Edit your tweet, change a few words, and try to be as concise as you can, but ensure all the while that you do not break the rules of proper English usage. If this attempt results in less than 140 characters, you are good to go, if not then you still have an unsolved problem on your hands.

The second way: Use chat lingo like u, gr8, dat, etc. Remove any extra words that may be grammatically correct, but are not needed to get the meaning across. In short, just type your message in any way that get the meaning gets across.  With SMS already being a part of our lives, this method comes naturally to most of us.

If you were tweeting to impress someone (maybe an editor, or a boss), you might want to take the first route. But, more often than not, Twitter is used as a platform for informal interaction, and playing by the rules is not that important. Therefore, most people choose the second way of making sure that their message does not cross 140 word limits.

As an example in the image above, I have taken one of my own tweets from not too long ago. At the time of tweeting that, I had no idea that I would be writing this post.

What do you think: Does Twitter make you a better writer or a worse one. Or, does it have no effect on your writing?

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The idea behind this is simply to have a group of bloggers setting aside a month of their time to work at improving their blogs. While we all want to have better blogs sometimes it becomes one of those things that we’re going to do…. one day.

I personally find that I improve (in all areas of my life) when I’m more intentional and set aside a specific time to make the improvements. That’s what this project is about.

The idea appealed to me as I have also been trying to make some changes to improve this blog for quite some time now, but, for one reason or another, I have always procrastinated. So, though this project comes at a time when I have quite a few obligations already lined up, I have signed up for the project and am looking forward to it.

The project was to start on April 1 (and it was no April fool’s joke), but as notified by Darren through an email, the project has been delayed and will start on April 6.  That means you still have time to join in the fun.  And if you are a skeptic, I will say, “Give it a shot, what harm can come of it?”

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This is true for writing too. Writing by its very nature is a continuous activity. If you are not doing it on a continual basis, you are not doing justice to your writing. But just being continuous is not enough. You have to ensure that what you have written today is, in some way, better than what you wrote yesterday.

If you are going to be writing on a regular basis (blogging or freelancing), you will have to develop a system for your writing.

The system can involve choosing the best time for your writing, the best environment for your writing, the subjects you have knowledge about etc. It is just important to start somewhere. I am not going to go into the details of a system, because every person will have to make the effort to find out this system for his/her self.

Once this system is in place, all you have to do is keep on improving it. Identify what things can be done in a better way. What you need to do to write better, and how you can implement these things in your system that they become a part of your writing process, and you do them without thinking about them.

Kaizen, or the principle of continuous improvement, involves a cycle of Planning, Doing, Checking and Acting. Though this cycle was designed for manufacturing processes, I strongly feel that it can be used to improve the writing process just as much.

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In fact, I am sure, many people these days get their first experience of the Internet through a social networking site.

The Nielsen report further states that, “Facebook - the world’s most popular social network - is visited monthly by three in every 10 people online across the nine markets in which Nielsen tracks social networking use.”

Another social networking site that is making the news these days is twitter. Though, it seems, twitter has not made it into the report this year, but if it continues to grow at the rate it is growing, no report will be able to ignore it. So, one can’t help but wonder, what keeps twitter growing, even in the face of competitors like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut etc. Here are some reasons that I feel are contributing to the success of twitter, and set it apart from any other social networking site:

1) Simplicity: I don’t know what Albert Einstein had in mind when he said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,” but this quote describes twitter aptly. Using the site is very simple, and it helps in achieving the basic purpose. You can share what is happening in your life, and others can tell you what is going on with theirs. That’s it. No frills, all value!

2) Comparative Newness: There seems to be a soft corner in the Internet user’s heart for start-ups. The Internet user wants to support any thing that is trying to establish itself against something that is already established. Maybe it makes him feel that, someday, he can start something like this of his own, and succeed.

3) Increased anonymity: Twitter does not ask for a lot of information and does not have a lot of information displayed on the profile page. You can choose to reveal as much of you as you want, which, I feel, makes a lot of people feel safe and comfortable. They can tell others about things that they want to, and keep other things to themselves.

4) What are you doing?: This is the simple question that twitter asks. And, this is the question everyone loves to answer. Why? The one reason I can think of is that when other people know about what we are doing, it makes us feel like a celebrity, and who does not want to feel that way?

5) Celebrities on twitter: Another reason for twitter’s recent popularity is the joining-in of many celebrities. A list of celebrities on twitter can be found here. If all these celebrities can find time to twitter, why can’t we? Plus, we can have the additional benefit of knowing what is happening in their lives before anyone else.

6) Twitter as news-breaker: Increasingly, twitter has started to act as source of breaking news. From my experience, I can safely say that I read about a few news items on twitter before I read them in the papers. I am sure you have had experiences like that too.

7) Link sharing: We all know how we bloggers, and other website developers, are forever interested in sharing our links with others, in the hope of getting a few more hits. Twitter allows us to do that, and, in fact, sends some good traffic to our site.

8 ) Rising Sun: There is a saying in Hindi that says, ” Everyone salutes the rising Sun.” Twitter, at the moment seems to be the rising Sun, and everyone seems to be saluting it.

Why do you like Twitter?

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This post is mostly about creative writing, but what is applicable to creative writing is, with a few necessary changes, applicable to any other form of writing.

The most common barrier to writing is the fear of making a mistake, or the fear of writing something that is boring, or unreadable. One just wants to sit on the desk, and start writing, with the hope that words will begin to tumble and an interesting, gripping, page-turning story will be born.

But, it is not that easy. Not even for professionals likes Stephen King and Jeffrey Archer.

Stephen King has always maintained that to write better one must make it a habit to write every day. I remember reading somewhere that his personal target is about 1500 words every day. I am not sure how many of us can write that much every day, and I, personally, have never tried to do that. But writing something everyday is very important for anyone who wishes to improves his or her writing.

I have recently started this practice, and though, I am not very sure how long I can continue it, yet I can already feel that the results are forthcoming.

Our minds are full of thoughts and ideas, but for one reason or another, we put off writing them down. We read what others have written and a bell rings in our mind, “This is exactly what I was thinking the other day!”

Perhaps you could have written that, perhaps you could have written even better. You can never know until you have tried writing it. So, every time you have a great idea, just write it down. There will be ample time to polish it later!

In another interview, Jeffrey Archer said that he, when he is working on a novel, writes for almost ten hours every day, and before he has the final draft ready, he has gone through almost forty revisions.

It is clear that writing takes time and effort, but if you do put in the time and effort, the results are there to for everyone to see.

So, as I come to the end of this post, I hope I have made my point clear. There are many books about writing and many websites, and I am sure all of them have some very useful tips for improving your wrting. But the most effective tip for improving your writing is : Write every day! Write as much as you can!

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But, if at some point you neglect  the baby, there is a good chance that it might not grow up to be “normal”. The same thing happens with a blog.

And when you know that you have neglected your baby, you feel guilty. That is how I feel right now, because I think I have been neglecting this blog for a very long time. Oft and again I have tried to get back on track with the blog, and oft and again I have failed.

But as they say, failure is no reason to give up. If anything, it is a reason to try harder.

So, once again, I am going to try and get the blog back on track. Hope this time it stays on track!

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One way is to apply the goal setting theory to our writing.

The goal setting theory is simply about setting goals for our writing. But we already do that, what is so special about this theory? This theory says that our goals should have four essential qualities:

1. Specificity: The goal should be specific. We always say, “I am going to write more,” or “I will be writing a book this year,”  or something like that. But what we should be saying instead is, ” I will be writing for one hour every day,” or “I will be finishing one chapter of the book I am writing every week,” or something else like that. Having specific goals makes them attainable.

2. Complexity: The goal should not be too difficult, nor should they be too easy. When a goal is too difficult, it is easy to give up. When it is too easy, it simply is not challenging enough. Sometimes we set ourselves the goal of writing a whole book, when, in the past, we might not have written even a long enough story. At other times, we might be satisfied with our blogging alone. Both these goals are not good enough to keep up our motivation levels high. We need to come up with something that is challenging enough and yet attainable.

3. Foreseeable Future: The goal should not be set for a very distant period of time. For example, setting a goal for the whole year will not be as effective a motivator as a goal set for a week or a month. When we see ourselves achieving our goals, we are motivated to continue on that path, and achieve more of our goals.

4. Measurable: Lastly, and this is closely related to specificity, the goal should be measurable. After we have achieved our goal, we should be able to measure what we have achieved against what we had set out to achieve. If there is something we need to change, we can. If not, we can continue achieving our goals as we did in the past.

Happy goal-setting!

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If you have been blogging on a regular basis, over a long enough period of time, you must have had days when you have run out of ideas.  You cannot write a post, even if your very life was depending on it.  The reasons for this phenomenon could be many, but the existence of this phenomenon is undeniable.

Here are a few steps that could help in such a situation:

1. Prevention, I am sure you have heard, is better than cure. This may sound like no advice at all, but as far as possible avoid getting into a position where you have to search for ideas. Plan most of your posts in advance, so that there is no last minute rush - and accompanying panic - to come up with a blog post.

2. Writing on a regular basis and to a schedule is another important ingredient to successful blogging or, for that matter, successful writing. If, like me, blogging is not the source of your bread and butter, then it would be best if you work out a schedule for yourself where you set aside an hour every day for writing. You could devote more time, but ensure that you spend at least an hour every day writing.

3. Read some blogs from your own niche. Identify some blogs in your own niche that you like, and that stay up to date with the latest news and information about the things that you write about. This is not  an advice to copy content from other blogs, but to know about the latest happenings and news. Equipped with that knowledge, you can go ahead and offer your own unique perspective about the issues on your blog.

4. Become an Expert. The fundamental questions is : Why should anyone come to your blog? The answer is pretty obvious. You have something to offer that they may not easily find anywhere else. By becoming an expert on the subject you write about, you  increase the amount of information that you have, and that you can share with others on your blog. If you observe, most successful bloggers are really good at doing the things they write about.

5. Guest blogging. When you have absolutely nothing to write about, a good idea could be to have someone post as a guest blogger. Guest blogging is not only an effective tool to build networking and backlinks (and we know how bloggers are crazy for those two things), but also provide a change for the readers who might begin to get a little bored from your regular style of writing. Variety, after all, is the spice of life, and your blog could do with a little spice.

What do you do when you run out of ideas? Do you have any ideas of your own that you would like to share?

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