It was exactly 16 months ago today that I posted my first video on my YouTube channel.   In fact, it was a live stream to an audience of one.  Although actually that one person was just me, viewing the livestream on May's (my wife) iPad to check that I was actually streaming!  

Take One Tech has come a long way since then and is now so much more than just a YouTube channel. Whilst YouTube is still my main creative outlet and has just passed the 3,000 subscriber milestone, I'm also now creating content on Amazon, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook too.  I've recently added a podcast to the weekly schedule as well.

Then there is another business side to Take One Tech, providing training courses and consultancy services. The best part, though, has to be the community that is now growing on my Discord Server.   The level of connection and engagement that we have there is the most rewarding aspect of this content creation journey, to use a cliché.  

I did start out with a plan, but that plan has certainly evolved into much more than I dared to imagine.  That said, there is one part of my initial plan that I just never got around to.... a blog!   It was my intention, from day one, to have a blog on my website to document the process of growing my channel and to provide extra context to some of my video content. It was also going to provide an outlet for general commentary on the tech space.   I actually enjoy writing when I give myself the opportunity.  I don't claim to be a great writer, though, so I make no such promises in that regard.

One of the struggles I've had, more so in recent months, is regaining the flow that I had for my first 6 months on YouTube.  I feel I started out as a sprinter and it actually felt almost effortless posting a video a day to my channel. I then had a number of events come out of left filled that really threw me off my stride. 

Outside observers may well have thought things were fine as the content was still flowing out at a fairly consistent rate. Behind the scenes, though, I just was not in a flow state any more and I was finding content creation a constant challenge.  Don't get me wrong, I do love a challenge, but this was something that I simply should not have been finding challenging.  It was this struggle to keep on top of what I was already doing that made me apprehensive to add more to my workload by having a blog to maintain!   

Recently, I have taken some time to reevaluate my priorities and processes.  I've been working on creating a fixed schedule to manage my time for creating various different types of content and then a distribution schedule to ensure that I am consistently posting across all of the platforms with long form and short for written, video and audio content.

I will, of course, be sharing my process on this blog, although it is still very much a work in progress and needs a little refinement before I do!  The point, though, is that I could not miss this opportunity to finally allocate some time in my schedule for maintaining a bog...

...and so here we are.  The end of the first post!