In 2020 I set myself the target of writing (almost) every day. Conservatively, this has produced at least 150,000 words \u2013 approaching three books’ worth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rule I developed was that every day I had to write at least 500 words, or for 20 minutes \u2013 whichever came first. Often I’d go for longer because I could, but sometimes I’d just be grudgingly typing near-nonsense and using the “word count” feature every few words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The goal was to do this for 300 days of the year. Writing this today is number 327.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost without exception, I made this the first activity of my day \u2013 early in the morning before there could be any demands on my time. On the rare occasions where I couldn’t write early or found an excuse not to, I’d have to fit it in later \u2013 and the quality was far, far lower.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, was it worth it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I followed a running programme this year that involved running every day, but mostly slowly at a low heart rate. You wouldn’t expect this to help with shorter, fast-paced efforts like a 5k race \u2013 but it did. Something about the act of running frequently helped with fluidity<\/em>, regardless of pace or effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also helped eliminate the niggles and aches I previously had for the first mile or so before I was properly warmed up. After a couple of months of running every day, I could just put my shoes on and get going at a decent pace \u2013 without any complaints from my knees or hips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing is similar. By writing every day, it’s become easier to just start without agonising about how<\/em> to start, then get into the flow quickly. I’ve not timed it, but I’m sure my “1,000 word article” race time has come down significantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is helpful, because my career involves <\/em>writing but produces lots of other demands on my time that prevent me from having multi-hour blocks to sit staring at a blank screen. Now, even if I’ve only got a 15-minute gap, I’m now able to bash out something halfway decent \u2013 whereas it might have taken me a morning previously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My hypothesis was that writing every day would naturally generate more ideas for what to write about. This was wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or at least, semi-wrong. I have a list of at least 50 ideas in my queue, and over the year I’ve got better at spotting thoughts throughout the day and thinking “huh, that might make for a good article”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then by the time I sit down to write, the inspiration has faded. I’m stuck staring at titles like “The age of the introvert” and “What to do instead of going to University”, where I pretty much know what I meant when I captured the thought but don’t feel equipped to flesh it out into a meaningful article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There must be a solution for this, but I haven’t come up with it yet. Perhaps it’s making fuller notes when I capture the idea \u2013 such as a few possible sub-topics, or the main insight I want people to come away with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best thing about writing for this site is I really don’t care if anyone reads it, so I don’t have to write articles that are optimised for people to discover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of my articles aren’t about topics that anyone would deliberately be looking for. Approximately nobody is searching for articles about why I take a photo every day<\/a> or how to be right about everything<\/a>. This puts me under no pressure to apply “SEO” to them, or research the best articles that already exist on those subjects so I can write something more comprehensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because I’m not writing to please Google’s algorithm, I can use SEO-nightmare titles like The 100 Hour Rule<\/a> and You’re an egomaniac, I’m an egomaniac<\/a> \u2013 which would be a disaster for getting discovered, but do a better job of pulling people into the articles once they’ve found the site through some other means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m also not trying to stay focused on a particular topic. So while productivity bloggers are dressing up “how to have a killer morning routine” for the millionth time, I’m happily skipping from parenting<\/a> to veganism<\/a> to dodgy downloads<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I was a proper blogger, this is the point where I’d show you a Google Analytics screenshot of my traffic going “up and to the right”. But as we’ve established, I’m not a proper blogger: I’m focused on process rather than results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the 150,000 words I’ve written this year, I’ve got one-and-a-half bad first drafts of new books written. There’s a long way to go until they’re ready for publication (if they ever are), I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to get a book sort-of written in 20 minutes per day for a year if I hadn’t tried it. I’m not pretending it’s the ideal way to write a book, but it’s possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve also published 50 articles. Most of them are average in the extreme. There are a few I really like though, such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So overall, has developing the writing habit been worthwhile? Definitely yes, and I’ll be continuing it next year \u2013 so watch this space for even more average articles and half-finished book drafts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 2020 I challenged myself to write for 20 minutes every day. What were the results, and was it a habit worth building?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWriting doesn’t<\/em> generate ideas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Writing for the fun of it is…fun<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The results<\/h2>\n\n\n\n