Challenge: Three Months and a Day
Since finishing Write of Passage this past Wednesday, I have already found that I have been writing less frequently this last week. Without the pressure of the class, and without the need to attend several live sessions every week I am finding it very easy to skip my daily writing habit. I'm still writing enough to publish a post and a newsletter, but the hours spent on that don't need to be evenly spread out throughout the week. That is leading to a lack of consistency in my writing that I'm not crazy about. After reading https://nesslabs.com/100-articles-100-days, I was inspired to do my own consistency challenge: Three months and a day.
From now until the end of June, I will be striving to publish something nearly every single day. I know that there will be setbacks, and some days it just won't get done, so I am shooting for roughly a 90% success rate. Rounding it a bit, I am setting a target of at least 80 posts published by the end of June. There is no criteria on what I post, so I expect it to be a wide variety of content, from book summaries some days, to software tutorials on others, with write-ups about things I know (or want to know) scattered around here and there.
There are a couple of key objectives that I'm hoping to get out of this challenge:
Pin down my personal monopoly (concept from David Perell). I have a rough idea of what this is, but I know that this will start to solidify as I write more and identify what I enjoy writing and what I don't. Originally I figured it would be a slow but steady process to pin this down, but I'm thinking if I can publish eighty posts by the end of June I can expedite the process a bit.
Get better at writing short form content. Even in the WoP assignments to write shorter posts, mine tended to expand to take up ~1500 words minimum. This isn't crazy long, but I want to have some of my content be more focused ideas. If I'm going to be going from draft to publishing within a single day, I don't have a choice, I will have to keep the posts short and focused.
Generate more ideas. Roam Research is helping a bunch with this already, but I'm not applying the generation effect enough to really get as much value out of it as I can. But if I have to publish every single day, I will need a lot more ideas, so this should be a forcing function to get me to capture more, curate better, and take the time to use what I have.
This isn't going to be an easy challenge. In order to get it done I am attaching an hour of writing onto my morning routine. That alone may not be enough to do what needs to be done, but at the very least it is enough to write a draft that I would be scared to publish as-is, which will encourage me to go back and edit throughout the day since it will be getting published in the evening either way.
With a routine to push me and the objectives to guide me, I'm looking forward to really putting the blade to the grindstone and honing my writing over the next few months. The Three Months and a Day challenge has begun.
One last thing.
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