Blogging while driving

Are you one of those people that has a hard time finding time to write down all of your great thoughts into one or more blog posts, edit them and get them all posted? I am definitely one of those people.

Inspiration for blog posts seem to come at the most inconvenient times -- often, it's the shower or while driving in the car when I don't have the means to capture the ideas. Recently, I've been spending more and more of my idle time in the car thinking about blog post ideas. Now, the idea is not to write down or type up these thoughts while driving, but the idea is to somehow capture your idle thoughts about blogging or other interesting things so you can fully process and post them later on. What I've started doing is leaving myself voice mails from my cell phone containing the contents of the intended posts. Then, when I get into the office, I can transcribe these thoughts and ideas into a proper blog posts, clean them up and quickly post them. This process helps me in a number of ways. Number one, I don't lose those important, often fleeting thoughts that I think will be good blog posts, and I'm also more productive while driving because I'm not doing much else while sitting in traffic.

This idea of transcribing verbal messages is easy if you're like me and your voice mails are sent to your inbox through unified messaging software. In this case, listening to it on your computer and transcribing it is very easy. If you don't have this capability, there may be a few other steps you need to go through, but it can still make you more productive overall. One other option is to use recorded voice notes on your cell phone and then transcribe those. Either way, transcribing blog posts that you create while you are driving can be really helpful in creating more posts in a more regular way. Of course, it goes without saying that if podcasts are your thing, this method works just as well -- you just need to make sure that you have a good cell signal and can do the cast in single take or with minimal editing.

(...and yes, this post was created by transcribing a voice mail conveniently waiting for me in my inbox when I arrived at the office.)
(Photo courtesy of dakinewavamon)