I’ve had “draft a blog post on x topic” on my projects list for ages. See, I’ve had a website for years, but never really used it or the accompanying blog. But I have a lot of ideas I want to share! I have a whole ass content strategy mapped out for this website… but I have been absolutely unable to get that content written. I needed a way to get this content written and published and off my to-do list because honestly y’all, I was tired of looking at it 🤣🤣🤣
I’m in the middle of looking for a new full-time role so in addition to building a new portfolio I also knew I wanted to create a few “thought leadership” articles for my website. Unfortunately for me, the concept of building an entire website full of content was just too daunting and the wall of awful of starting from scratch was just too big.
For those of you unfamiliar with the wall of awful but who don’t want to watch the video, the wall of awful is defined by its creator Brendan Mahan as “…the emotional barrier that grows out of repeated failure, preventing us from taking risks and initiating tasks.” This barrier can feel insurmountable for people with neurodivergent brains, and while there are ways to overcome it, sometimes the best way is to just remove it, and that’s what I decided to do with this project.
I spent some time thinking about what specifically was tripping me up and do I actually want and realized that although a full launch felt overwhelming, adding value to existing content sounded fun. So the next challenge is to figure out how to turn this into a maintenance and growth project instead of a creation and launch project. The solution pretty much jumped out at me as soon as I had the thought of idea to switch it from a creation to a maintenance project.
See, I’ve been playing around with chatGPT for a few months now and while I found it somewhat helpful, I never really put effort into using it to make a meaningful impact on my productivity. Since I was struggling to get this project off the ground, I thought this project could be a good place to start by using AI to help me write starter versions of the first few articles in my content strategy. This lets me really experiment with the impact of AI on my workload AND helps get me over the wall of awful and into forward momentum.
To do the actual writing, ChatGPT was given the following instructions:
“congratulations! you are my newly hired ghostwriter! please write an 800-word blog post on the topic: :: topic::, the article should include detailed examples, relevant background information, and a story to create interest. it should be written in an upbeat tone that is still professional. it should be written as though it was by ::author info:: with a high-level understanding of ::umbrella and related topics::. please include keywords that will appeal to ::insert target audience::”
You eagle-eyed readers out there may have noticed I asked for stories but the posts don’t have any… well, I decided to cut all the stories it wrote because they were all written as personal experiences that were not true to me. I debated re-writing them but ultimately decided to take them out entirely because the point of starting with AI was to reduce the work involved in getting the content up and running so I could move forward with the rest of the project.
Although I haven’t decided what the process for this will be or how involved AI will be in the next phase, once all the initial posts have been published, I will be re-writing them 1-by-1 to incorporate my own research, additional ideas, and my own experiences and opinions so keep an eye out for updates!
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