Is a blog a distraction or a tool? That’s a question I keep asking myself.

To me it’s a tool that keeps me motivated. By publishing something on this blog, I’m announcing it to the world (well, ok, not the world, but perhaps both of my readers) and that kind of helps me commit.

When I was talking about the skill site this weekend, I knew that the idea was good. I knew it was something I could follow up on quickly.

Just like new year resolutions, it’s all too easy in this business to have ideas and then forget about them, moving on the next great thing.

Skill.co.uk could be a distraction from my other projects.

I’ve spent a day making a WordPress based site for it and have installed membership software and an autoresponder for handling email communication.

Some people would remain in the planning stage for a few months.

I don’t think I have time for that. I need to do it now, for the sake of my sanity, my ego and my satisfaction.

The thing is, I do have a lot of time on my hands and doing these sites keeps me interested in the technology and ensures that my knowledge grows continually.

It’s interesting to see how long “developers” take when building a site and comparing it to how long it takes me. Perhaps they have more attention to detail than I do – but it’s taken me only a day and a bit to put the site infrastructure in place for skill.co.uk and to do the design bits.

My commercial property site on the other hand, has taken a team of developers since May last year and I’ve still not launched it!

My tribute act  site was due for completion in December, but apart from the design, I haven’t seen a line of code yet.

So who’s distracted? I can’t do anything whilst my development is in the hands of others, so I might as well just get on with something else.

In 2010 my goals changed. I decided to aim a lot higher. Instead of being content with the scraps that fall from table, I’m going to build and own the table.

That’s some distraction!