Sam is blogging..

Sam is one of the loveliest people I have met through blogging/weeknoting. The early days of that initial Web of Weeknotes gang was soooo wonderful and Sam was a big part of that. Not to mention her Tiger Who Came to Tea blogpost is something I consistently share far and wide.

What is your blogs URL?
https://stamanfar.medium.com/

When did you first start blogging? Do you remember your first post? Is it still online?

Can I just say my school days were some time ago and the way we communicated with people we were friends with but who we didn't have classes with was to go home in an evening and write little notes or letters to one another. I spent so many school nights writing little letters to friends about boys or what we would be wearing to some event, or just general anxiety about life. So I think that communicating via writing was massively important to me from quite early on.

But blogging, oh my god. I started blogging after university which was sometime in the early 2000s before Facebook was born. I'd just got a pink Sony Cybershot digital camera and used my blog as a way to share (quite often inebriated) images of nights out with friends. It was utterly cringeworthy and even if it was still online I definitely wouldn't be telling you!

Several years of social media passed and then I started a small blog in 2011 called Antique Owl, which basically documented things I'd found at antique, flea and vintage markets.

I didn't start blogging for work until 2017 when I'd been in the civil service for a couple of years. I started writing Weeknotes.

Since then I've used a similar approach within project work, insisting on delivering a sprint review every 2 weeks which acts as a way of making an asset of a sprint which I find useful for getting stakeholders on board, of demonstrating progress and keeping that 'memory' of the work.

What platform did you start with?

My early blogs were Wordpress. Blogging for work started with Medium.

What do you use now?

I've stuck with Medium despite... well despite Medium being Medium.

in the early days of my blogging for work this was the best place to be as everyone was there and it was a lovely sociable space. I really enjoyed reading and highlighting interesting aspects of people's writing. Things are a little fragmented now and I sometimes struggle to keep up.

Do you remember the first blog/blogger you regularly followed?

I think it was Dan Barrett, he was blogging from Parliamentary Digital Service at the time and then Julie Byrne followed suit. I followed them and had a couple of catch ups with them both before I started blogging. I'll be honest, most of the bloggers were men and it took Julie getting involved for me to really feel like it could be a space for me, so I'm grateful to them both for that.

There was an early small group of people who gathered around your Web of Weeknotes: You (Jukesie), Dan, Julie, Louise Cato, Jonathan Kerr. I adored reading them all.

What is the biggest benefit you get from the practice of blogging?

In the early days it was community, and that was a big reason. I was lonely and confused in the civil service and it really helped me to read about other's experience and find my way. The friends and connections I made in those early days are still friends and people I really value and learn a lot from.

I liked that weeknotes acted a lot like a conversation, people would respond and highlight and comment and share. I learned a lot because I put out in the open what I didn't know. It led me to a vast network of thoughts and links and I think it helped me to grow a lot.

That said this kinds of suggests I was writing for other people which also isn't really true. I think the benefits have also changed over time.

In the early days it pushed me to find interesting things out of my comfort zone so that I would have things to write about and think more about!

Now, I think it offers me a space to think in my own voice and to work through problems. I'd describe this as reframing. I want to be able to look at issues and work out how I'm going to think about them so I can keep moving and learning, rather than dwelling on things that aren't working. It means understanding and acknowledging the bad stuff so I can turn it into something I'm actually going to be able to do something about. Like a retro, but for my dusty old brain. I made some stickers saying 'Be generous' after realising that this is a key aspect of this kind of work. Being fair, living by the retrospective prime directive, learning for myself.

I really appreciate having a version of my memory outside of my head. Blogging offers me a place where I can go to remember details or to understand how something was. This has been really useful recently when I've been working on my portfolio and I'd forgotten some of the details or images or thinking that had been done.

I genuinely think it's improved my confidence, I feel surer in the things I think and feel, in understanding how I work and what I care about, because i've spent that time working through it.

Finally, happy by-product is that people seem to know me. I'm generally fairly awkward so going to a conference and having people say hi to me is always a surprise but it very lovely.

Do you have a writing routine for your blogging?

I try to write on a Friday but it is often early morning on a Saturday or Sunday. I don't often collect things through the week because I find it useful to go back over the things and reorder them without the constraints of what happened on what day. As a result it can sometimes take me a bit longer to write, because I'm doing the thinking as I'm doing the writing.

I would love to be able to write traditional weeknotes talking about detailed information about a service. What has happened, what happens next, but the bulk of my work has been that gluey stuff that sits inbetween professions and different approaches, so I feel like I haven't really had much choice but to talk about my working, my methods, my thinking.

What advice would you give somebody who is thinking about starting blogging?

Don't overthink it. Sometimes golden nuggets come out but mostly the blogging I do is the practice which helps me to uncover those nuggets. Most of what I write is uneventful, mundane, innocuous even, but it is better for me to do that than to sit on thoughts and not do anything with them!