T5: Past As Prologue

Spot for reflection,Grand Hotel,
Mackinac Island, Mich.

I've found that written reflections, set down immediately after a project ends, are wonderful guides for future performance. You want the emotions associated with various challenges to be as fresh as possible, allowing you to put the proper emphasis on the problem and inject a sense of urgency into possible solutions. It is important to write them down, and soon, because as time goes by, those memories tend to fade into an overall sense of relief and fatigue: "Well, it got done, and thank God it's behind us. I'm sure whatever challenges we overcame we'll be able to overcome again -- if any of us are still here when they come up again."

Often my reflections settle down into a checklist I can file and unearth when a similar project comes along. The goal is to learn from your own mistakes, and who among us can keep all those problems and, more importantly, all those solutions in our head once the sediment of subsequent experiences settle over them?

So, how does this apply to "23 Things"? Here are a few reflections:

1. Realizing that this blog would be on a participants list displayed alphabetically, I would have been wiser to title the blog with a word that begins with the letter "A". That way, other participants probably would have stumbled across it. I find that when I have time to browse the various blogs, I unthinkingly start at the top and scroll down.

2. The value of an "environmental scan" cannot be overstated. It's no crime to poke around on other people's blogs to find creative approaches and then adapt them to create a more interesting site of one's own. It takes time but it stokes the creative fires. In fact, just by writing this, I'm thinking I need to look at more blogs still. And I will.