January 19, 2021

What I’ve Learned From Failing at My Goal of Publishing Everyday

Towards the end of December I set myself a challenge of publishing something everyday for 30 days - this was a big change from my previous habit of posting approximately never. I knew it was ambitious, but I really wanted to get out of a perfectionist mindset and put something out there even if it was short or imperfect.

I started on Dec 27 and kept it up until Jan 10, so despite technically failing, I’m actually pretty pleased - 15 days! A few reasons why I failed:

There is a global pandemic on, the hospitals here are full, I’m on the other side of the world from most of my friends and family, US politics are a bit much at the moment, I received some frustrating news about my immigration status, and we are going through some huge transitions at work… Needless to say, I’ve been a bit distracted! I may have been a bit unrealistic about what I could take on.
I usually spend a lot of my spare time reading and thinking, which sparks a ton of ideas to write about. In order to publish something everyday, I had to spend most of my spare time writing instead, which meant I didn’t have my usual inputs for inspiration. I simply found I had less to write about.
I do have a backlog of thoughts and ideas that I plan to write up more fully, so I tried to turn to them instead. The problem is, unlike a quick reaction to a podcast or article, they all felt like Very Big Things to write up and I just didn’t have the energy to dive in.
I had scheduled time in both the morning and evening for writing, but I just couldn’t get into my morning writing sessions knowing I needed to start work in an hour or so. I know people usually say to do creative work in the morning, but no matter how hard I try I seem to only be able to ease into it when I don’t have any other time-sensitive obligations for the day.
The problem is, that meant I was waiting until after work to do my writing. In general this is not too bad, but last week was a particularly intense week, so by the evenings I had no mental energy left - that’s when I broke the “posting everyday” habit.
Another issue is that scheduling writing sessions in the evening meant that even if I had an idea I felt motivated to write about during the day, by the evening it just somehow felt less appealing. Again, with more mental energy I don’t think this is usually a problem, but when you’re tired you need that extra spark of motivation to actually do it.

Even though I failed to publish something everyday, it was a super useful exercise to attempt and I learned a lot. Some things I plan to do going forward:

One of my themes for the year is consistency, and part of consistency is not giving up just because you mess up a little. So I’m not going to beat myself up too much, and I’m still going to try to write frequently, even if everyday was too much.
I’m going to try to listen to my internal motivation a bit more, which means a) writing as soon as inspiration hits (if my calendar allows) and b) not feeling obliged to post everyday if I don’t have anything I’m particularly excited about writing.
I intend to prioritize my newsletter a bit more, and aim to send it more consistently (weekly), and perhaps focus more on curation. I’m hoping this will still exercise the ‘consistency’ muscle while feeling a bit more manageable.
Although I was trying to treat my posts almost like tweets in terms of how much I needed to write and how formal they needed to be, writing a post still felt like a bigger deal than I wanted it to. I might experiment with other ways to share less-polished thoughts, perhaps through a weekly post that contains snippets of notes I made that week.