In the last year I received a lot of feedback from coworkers that I should talk more about my work inside and outside the company. I felt so too. But since I am quite uncomfortable about promoting myself, I did not make much progress.

Learning in front of others

The breakthrough came with Austin Kleon’s book “Show your work!” in which he writes about how to promote yourself as an artist. He says: “The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.” With this I finally felt comfortable and even motivated. Writing about my successes or knowledge feels like bragging to me. But writing about my learning process feels perfect and much more interesting.

Making a plan

And still … it was so hard to actually make time for it. When I had a lot to do, I could hardly bring myself to sit two hours and write that newsletter or blogpost. My coworker and mentor Laurent Prodon suggested that I have a communication plan for each project. We discussed together when it would make sense to inform who about each project. This made it less optional to write about my stuff, but more a part of my daily work that just needs to be done. I did not really have an excuse anymore to not write that blog post.

Time for boredom

I am passionate about my job and I have a family I care for. Sometimes my life is really packed and leaves very little time for breaks or doing nothing. In such phases, it is hard for me to be creative. I need enough free time and a certain amount of boredom to write. Just a time slot in between two tasks will not do. I realised that I need to be more careful with my time. In the last months I could take some days off and make room for days with no plans. After some hours lying motionless on the sofa I got up and started reflecting what I actually have done and learned in the last weeks and transform it into articles.
If you want to know more about the importance of boredom, watch this TED Talk from Manoush Zomorodi 

Keeping and revisiting a diary

But what should I write about? For a long time I thought that I don’t have anything interesting to tell. I found it hard to formulate what I have learned, achieved, solved or fucked up in projects. It all seemed so obvious and unimportant in hindsight.
Already some years ago, I started keeping a work diary with Day One to remember better what I struggled with in different phases. That helped me to see and acknowledge how far I have come and not only to look at the mountain that is still in front of me.
Austin Kleon’s blog post about different techniques in keeping a diary  inspired me to write a summary about my entries each month. Suddenly I had much more clarity about what I had learned in the last weeks.

So the best way for me to write about my work, was to keep a diary on what I learn, revisit and summarise it regularly, to have a rough plan on how often I want to publish something and I needed enough boredom in my life to get creative.