What I Learned from Writing Daily for 1 month?

Exactly one month ago, I made a public declaration that I will writing one post a day for 365 days. It was an attempt to build a writing habit for myself, and as a personal challenge. It has been one month since then and I want to summarise the good lessons learnt. You can read it my bold project below.

What Sounds Good May Not Be Good

When I went into this challenge, I carried the thought that “Quantity over Quality”. If I write daily for 1 year, surely there will be one or two excellent posts. In fact, there are articles supporting this theory on Medium and SPI.

However, I realised there are some practical issues.

Quality Really Suffered

While the habit of writing daily did produce some good articles, which I am immensely proud of, such as this, this and this. There were also less than ideal ones such as this and this. One of them even had a factual error which I only found out from my reader’s feedback (Talk about embarrassment)

So the main issue I had with writing daily is that, there really isn’t that many great ideas to write everyday! Some days, I just crawl through online for topics. I hated that because it was not a topic that I was interested in writing. Simply, I wrote for the sake of writing.

Lack of Coherence

Writing daily also made it hard to find coherence between the articles because all my mind could think of was, “WRITE AND WRITE AND WRITE”.

I did not spend enough time to think about a good topic that I can spend 3-4 articles writing about and providing good value. For a moment, I felt like I was back in my old 9-to-5 job churning staff papers (yikes).

What Did I Learned?

However, I also learned several great lessons from writing daily.

Habits Beats Willpower

When I was writing daily, I would often leave it to any free time that I had.

I will write it when I am free

That approach sucks. I would often put it off till the end of the day when I was tired and yearning to sleep. It was a disaster because writing is mentally taxing and requires clarity of mind. When I reviewed my articles, I realised the good ones are often written in the morning while the bad ones are often written at night.

After realising that I am much better at writing in the morning, I decided to make it easier by shaping my habits.

For example,

• I allocate 1 hour of protected time in the morning to write, no disturbance.
• I do not schedule any meetings in the morning.
• If there is a meeting, I will wake up earlier to write.

By shaping my habits, I found it easier to write and the quality improved because it became less of a hassle to write and I enjoyed it more.

Go Slow to Go Fast

I also noticed that if I take a couple of days to plan my articles properly, the actual writing time became more efficient. I would take less time to write because my thoughts will be more coherent and orderly.

This is actually something that I learned in the military but failed to apply till I rediscovered it.

In the military, we would spent months planning our attack or defense plan before the actual battle, because we know that when the battle begins, it will be over in days and that leaves us with no time for detailed planning.

Applying my military instinct to writing really helps.

Take this article as an example, I have been writing pointers about it and reviewing them for 2 days before I start typing. It started with over 20 pointers, and I trimmed it down to just these few. If I were to start writing those 20 pointers, this article would have been too long and lack of focus.

Never Take a Break For More than 2 Days.

This lesson learnt may be unique to me. Do try it out to see if it applies to you too.

My daily writing also faced some disruptions once in a while due to family time, time spend with my community (it is a paid membership so I need to prioritise them over my own project here).

However, I noticed that whenever I took a break, so long I was back to writing within the next 2 days, it will be alright. The habit will stick and I can get back pretty quickly. In fact, it energises me to write again after break. Similar to how weekends energise workers after 5 weekdays of work.

But when the break was longer than 2 days, I would be screwed. I would be reluctant to start writing again. The inertia was so great that I began procrastinating on it. And the next thing you know, I have not written for 1 week. Check out my last post here and you will know what I am saying.

Was This A Success?

So was my pledge to write daily a success? In terms of the exact pledge, I will confess that it was not a success. However, I would not call it a failure as well.

I achieved the following:

• I had a streak of writing more than 10 days in a roll
• I had more than 5000 views in total, and increased my mailing list by another 120+ subscribers
• I discovered a more disciplined method of writing and will continue to do so.

That’s all! I will continue to write but at a more sustainable pace. On the note of investing, it has been an interesting ride for the last two weeks. I will post some updates soon!