A Few Thoughts on Intentionality

It's been over a month since my last post. I'd like to say that it was an intentional break, but that's not really true--at least not entirely.

I usually try to write at least one post a week, which keeps me actively writing. And, as one of my friends has repeatedly reminded me over the past year, writing is thinking...and a big part of my job as a professor is thinking. So in this sense, blogging is almost a professional responsibility for me, or at least thinking about my teaching, and what I'm reading, and how I'm connecting with my field is, and that's primarily what I try to do here on the blog.

But as the busyness of the end of the semester and the Christmas season swelled, I just didn't make time for writing. And then I was out of town over the holidays and I intentionally left my laptop at home, to have an intentional break from all things work-related. And now that I've been back in the office for the past week or so, I've been preparing syllabi for the new semester, and working on a new course that I'm teaching for the first time, and making plans for some additional courses for the EdTech track in our Master of Education program.

I feel like I'm making excuses for why I haven't been blogging. The reality is that I have not been intentional about creating space for it. I haven't felt inspired to write lately, and even though it gives me a lot of joy, it has felt too much like, well...work.

It's funny: while I was in grad school, I was blogging actively...and I was busy all the time between work and class and homework (and trying to keep up as a husband and father and church member) and yet I kept writing. I think partly it was because I was in the habit of reading and writing ALL THE TIME in grad school, and blogging was writing "just for me," which made it a joyful, life-giving thing. And honestly, I had to be intentional about it, because I had so many other things going on in my life, that if I wanted to keep writing on the blog, I had to carve out 20 minutes here or there to work on a post.

And so I'm thinking now about carving out some intentional time each week just for blogging. If I put it in my calendar, will I be more likely to stick to it? Probably.

I'm a little late for making New Year's resolutions, so we'll just call this an "intention" instead.

So here's my intention for this spring semester: I'm going to intentionally carve out space a couple of afternoons a week for reading and writing, and I'm going to intentionally work on at least one blog post each week.

That's my intention, anyway. We'll see how this goes.

Image from Pixabay. [Public Domain]

You know what? I discovered something I find funny and odd: there's an awful lot of photos of laptops and coffee mugs if you search for "blog" on Pixabay. Seriously...you should check it out for yourself.