Blogging dividend!

I had to make a presentation, this morning, at Brockholes, the nature reserve near Preston (pictured above). I knew what I needed to talk about and I set aside yesterday afternoon to write out what I'd need to say.

I had to talk for ten minutes, so I marked out ten headings - Minute 1, Minute 2 etc - in a Word document, and then put a couple of lines under each one, saying what I'd be talking about at that point. I didn't even think about the structure, really, I just took what I had in my head and distributed it across the ten minutes, and then I fleshed out the content. All in all, it took me just under an hour.

Later on, I was thinking about how the structure had come to me so easily and I realised it's the result of three and a half years of writing a blog post every day. Once I know what I want to say, I can arrange the post's structure very quickly. I remember that it used to take me ages. Sometimes a four paragraph post might take me a couple of hours!

I rehearsed the presentation twice last night and once while I was sat in the Brockholes car park, this morning, before I went in. And then I performed it. I received some lovely feedback afterwards and even made arrangements for a couple of meetings next week. It's funny, I rarely talk about work - or the specifics of it - in my blogs, which I see as quite separate, so it was a pleasantly surprising dividend to find this hobby helping me in my work.