Yesterday, I said that I keep a topic list that goes at least a month out. In reality, not all of those will be written into posts, but I need a lot of choices each morning as I sit down to write. The list is under constant maintenance, but the most important thing to do is to keep adding to it.

Here are some of the places those topics come from:

1. From a question I am using to drive my thinking. See: What are books for?
2. From the notes I am taking while reading. See Playing Non-programming Books
3. From writing posts. Yesterday I consciously listed the new topics I thought of while writing the post on topics.
4. From editing my banked posts. When I delete a paragraph that is interesting, but not related, that paragraph can become the seed of a new post.
5. From solitude. See Use Deprivation to Make Space
6. From correspondence. If someone asks me an interesting question, my answer can often be generalized into a blog post.
7. From my old work. I’ve been blogging and writing publicly for over 10 years. Old posts need updating: See Use GitHub Profile Pages to Mirror Your Personal Site
8. From my tweets. I don’t tweet a lot there are enough to look back at and see if there’s a bigger idea there.
9. From my other works. I write about my apps, like in Sprint-o-Mat 2021.1 is Available
10. Current events, like WWDC. See: WWDC 2020 Wishlist – Xcode / Swift or WWDC 2017 for iOS Developers

I personally keep them organized into a schedule so that each day, when I am ready to write, I can just look at that day’s topic and give it stab. It doesn’t always work out, but not having to choose from the list helps me get started.

If I give up on a topic, I can take what I’ve written and link it to that topic in Obsidian. I move it down a little in the list and move onto the next one.

If it’s too big, that’s actually great, because I break it down into a few mini-topics to build up to a bigger idea later.