My Cyber Cabin in the Woods

I’ve been spending way too much time online lately. I always do that when things in my personal life get nutty, as with our impending move to Dallas. I use the internet as a refuge.

Can’t find a house? No problem. Go into your Wordpress dashboard and play house there. Tweak Thesis to within one inch of its life.

A garage filled with crap to be sorted through? Time to take a hard look at your Twitter followers and weed out some of the people who are no longer participating.

Aware that you will need to discard baby items that have sentimental value because you can’t keep them all? Make a post about your children, or upload photos to Facebook.

The internet is hardly a world over which we have total control, but it does allow us to hide and dream and think that perhaps we are connecting with others and improving our personal organizational situations. Yet, I have two crochet projects that sit on my shelves, unfinished. I should be packing. Christmas shopping. Scrubbing the bathroom floor. Walking. Interacting with my children as often as possible.

So why do I find myself here with increasing frequency? In my mind, while everything around me is swept up in toddler tornadoes and cross-country move panic, I can come in here and build upon something concrete. Slowly and surely, brick by hard-won brick, I will have carved out a little place for myself in the midst of the deluge—my own little cyber cabin in the woods.

As is the way of the internet, my little cabin is hardly safe, and might even slide down a hill if the rain gets too heavy. I think that, perhaps, instead of spending too much time on the drapery and pillow covers, I should also work on its foundations. It’s not nearly as fun, but ten times as necessary. What are some things I should be doing?

• Learning about security and safety, but not overdoing it. There is always something to fear, but the thing we must fear the most, you may have heard, is fear itself.
• Determining my goal. If I don’t know what I’m aiming for I will surely never achieve it.
• Mastering SEO techniques. If I didn’t want people to visit my cabin I would be posting offline.
• Seeking out and supporting a list of like-minded bloggers. Taking a hard look at my current list of contacts.
• Setting up a daily routine with a time limit. (Oh, how I hate time limits and routines!) Something like, reading and commenting on blogs, one hour, posting, half an hour, etc. I might even want to expand this into a weekly schedule so everything gets covered.
• Perhaps expand the schedule to include a blog posting schedule. This way I could include a mix of diary posts for my own sanity, and potentially entertaining and helpful posts.
• After the move, make time for daily writing exercises. This is really where my blogging heart is, and learning to be a better writer can only have a positive impact on not only this blog, but on all of my communication attempts.

I’m in my personal comfort zone when winging it. But, as I recall, when I worked in an office I liked to have strict control over my activities to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. What was absolutely imperative was done first thing in the morning so that when urgent and unexpected situations presented themselves I was still firmly on track. If I were to approach my blogging activities through the eyes of a professional rather than those of a dabbler, I just might be able to manifest a highly satisfying experience for myself and my readers. Should I discover this to be impossible, at least I will know I did everything possible to make it happen, instead of waiting for it to happen to me.

Oh, and I should probably pack, too.

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Tagged as: Blogging, Social Media, Social Networking