One article a day, almost everyday

Ever since I figured out why I procrastinate, I've been wanting to test it out with other habits I wished I had. Writing is one of them, I've always liked the written word. Had a journal or a notebook to scribble stuff on for the past fifteen years, I still do. I never look back at those notebooks, and a lot of those notebooks are lost. Parsing through old notebooks is hard, whereas parsing through an API and doing a simple text search is not a problem at all. So I've been wanting to move more of my writings here. But most of them aren't share worthy, and are more ramblings than structured ideas. So I rarely share what I write, this turned out to be a bottleneck to my writing, perfection.

Sometime last month, I decided to write one line of an article a day, to build the habit of writing. It has been quite successful. The first step was to remove everything that hindered me from writing. Turns out I only had to stop doing a couple of things.

1. Wanting the writing to be interesting

It's natural to want to write things others find interesting. Letting go of this made it easier for me to write more often. I started writing for my satisfaction, rather than to please anyone else. This meant writing about anything and everything I found interesting without regard for anything else. This means I write more and often. It's the single best recipe for getting better. You'll find other things that will improve your writing, but as an eighty twenty rule, the simple act of writing more will improve your writing above all else.

2. Not having a habit of writing

In order to build a habit of writing, I decided to write everyday, till it became automatic. I find that early on during habit building, it's best to do it everyday. A simple trick, I found to make to ensure I do it everyday is that I aim to do the simplest version of the habit I can. So for writing, it is to write one line of an article a day. This means, even on the days you really don't feel like writing, when the threshold is one line, it's hard to come up with an excuse not to write. It's easier just to write a single line. More often than not, I have ended up writing complete articles. The first step is usually the biggest hurdle, the rest sort of finds itself.

In the last month, I have doubled the amount of posts I had on my blog. The quality is not great, but a habit is forming. I'm also finding it easier to expand on ideas. A few ideas tend to repeat themselves, but each repetition refines the idea/concept in my head. I'd encourage you to write more too, or any other form of articulating your thoughts. It helps you understand yourself better. Over the period of time you can reflect on your thinking process, how it changed and why. These are valuable insights from your own experience. If nothing, you'll have built a new habit, I think it's worth exploring.

Happy articulating :)