Defining Your Process

Today marks my 2 year anniversary at BTC Revolutions it’s been a life changing year for me and I’m looking forward to see how we will be changing the world in the next two!

I wrote this about two years ago, and never submitted it… I may be more Charlie than I expected.

I’m super excited to be a part of the #TeamBTC blog but as I stare into the emptiness of my Evernote page, I sigh… I need a topic. What better thing to write when you don’t know what to write but to examine how you write. My process has always been take the original topic given to me and completely change it as I go. I am an analogy writer through and through. I like to explain topics by looking at them from a different place.
Some people are procrastinators and work best when the pressure is on, some only like to hit bare minimum requirements counting each and every word as they go, and some tend to over-analyze things. There are many other ways people attack their particular to-dos but in the spirit of #JFDI, let’s just examine the four archetypes of process.
The song “Book Report” from You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a perfect, yet whimsical example of these four types. The four main characters lament about a recent homework assignment, each in different way.

Charlie Brown – Charlie Brown knows he needs to get his homework done, but he keeps putting it off. He is a classic procrastinator. I know I have a touch of classic Charlie Brown in my blogging style, I always think that I work better under pressure, this is not the case.
If you are a classic procrastinator, try and find ways to help yourself get out of the rut. Schedule a little time every day to get some writing done and just keep chugging along when you can. (I started this post yesterday when I had some downtime, and I’ll probably finish it tomorrow.)

Lucy VanPelt – (One of my life’s personal heroes by the way) wants nothing to do with writing her book report. She counts every word to hit the bare minimum and most of her words were very, very, very ,very ,very – unhelpful. What Lucy could do, is find a way to express herself in a format she enjoys. If you are a classic “Lucy” and do not enjoy blogging or writing but still want to get your message out, look for a different way to do it. A visual person might want to start making infographics. Are you a talker? Express yourself with video blogging.

Linus VanPelt – Linus is a very conscientious researcher but he lets his research take over and go off into tangents and analogies that don’t quite make sense. Don’t let your research take over your theme. If you start out with a topic that gets lost once you start putting words to paper (as it were) maybe the initial topic is not what you want to write about. Keep going into the direction of the research and make changes and tweaks accordingly.

Schroeder – Schroeder takes the subject and tries to find a way to explain it in a way that he finds the most entertaining. Using an analogy is a great way to explain things to people in a way that helps them understand new ideas in a familiar way. I am a classic Schroeder, some of my most popular posts have used this method to compare social media and blogging to pop culture. Shoot – that is the basis of this post itself!

While I am sure there are 100 different variations of each style listed above, every author is different. The point of this post is to get you to try to define your process. Once you define it, learn the best way to work with your type to best accentuate your writing.