Self-Restraint: Always a Good Thing For Me

I first want to say thank you for taking the time to read this blog. I have had this space created for a while but have not posted anything until now because I have other blogs to share out what I want to.

But I wanted to let you know that I ran into a snag with one of my blogs last week (Learning Side By Side w/ John Rivera). I was typing up a very extensive, thoughtful entry reflecting on an opinion article I read and tried to relate it to a recent professional development workshop I attended. I pretty much finished the entry (with links all over), and therefore clicked on "Post". Five minutes later, it still had not finished uploading. So I tried to copy the piece, but everything came out blank.

At this same time, my wife asked me to speak with her about some personal matters...

I was ready to explode but caught myself (imagine seeing myself looking over my own shoulder as this scenario was unfolding). I gathered my self before releasing my full attention to my wife, walking away from the computer that I almost used to create a new window in my home.

For days, I wanted to rant about this in my blog. But as the days went by, I found myself understanding the need for reflection on this situation. I thought about how I could have avoided the situation. After all, I've always told participants in my online courses that I facilitate to first type their discussion entries in a word processing document first so they could paste it into the discussion board of the class they were in.

Here is something I came up with recently as my solution. I will use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to publish my entries. This is because the file automatically saves every 20 seconds. And if I need to go back, I can cycle through revisions. For Blogger sites, you can automatically publish what you write in a Google document with just a couple of clicks. Too bad it doesn't do that as easy with my blogs hosted by other companies. Nevertheless, "copy and paste" is not something I would complain about.

Therefore, I was glad I didn't allow myself to lose it last week. I saved myself a lot of hours in having to possibly patch up a wall, apologize to my wife, rescue files from my computer, and displace anger wherever I went. Maybe I'll get to re-write what I really wanted to publish last week. We'll see!