Keeping up a Writing Practice Is Not Hard
Tuesday afternoon. A few hours before the deadline. But not just any deadline.
One that I imposed on myself.
And one that stresses me out because I haven't finished any of my writing ideas.
More than a year ago, I set myself the following challenge: "For one year, publish one blog post a week". That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Quick maths: That's 52 blog posts within a year. I even overshot my target. I learned so much from this experience.
But the challenge wasn't about that.
It was about consistency. About showing myself that I could consistently work on a goal that I set myself without any outside reward. It all was going great.
Until three weeks ago.
For the past three weeks, I started letting distractions back into my life. Distractions I successfully ditched were suddenly back on the menu.
They put my brain into procrastination overdrive. I knew it was getting bad when days started vanishing without anything getting done. Then suddenly some positive momentum came back around. I thought I had somehow gotten through again.
Until it happened again this week.
Seven ideas, none of them are finished. My worst week in a year.
So, in order to remind myself what worked in the past, I'm going to list the guardrails I put into place to create a sustainable writing practice.
I can't be the only one struggling with procrastination. The problem is not laziness. The main culprit are the distractions our digital world leaves at your fingertips. The bad news is that they're not going anyway anytime soon. They're probably going to get worse with the infinite content stream generative AI can produce. The good news is that we can build a system so we don't fall prey to them. For that, we're going to build the House Of Writing.
The Foundation: Kill Distractions
Lose the Phone
For the love of (insert favorite deity here), put your phone away.
If you're waiting for an important call and you feel unsafe leaving your phone somewhere not that accessible, at least try to hide it somehow. What works for me is putting a sheet of paper or a book over it. If you can't see your phone in your vicinity, it already reduces the chance of you picking it up. For all the utility this brings, don't forget smartphones and many of the apps are modeled after slot machines.
Create Focus Modes
I'm writing on a Macbook. This allows me to create so-called "focus modes". These control what notifications you can see and which are invisible.
Game changer.
Every time I write, I put all my devices in "Superfocus" mode. It's one I created myself.
Yes, I've had more creative name-giving sessions. Sue me.
What it does is much cooler than its name: it hides all notifications until I actively look them up. this ensures that I'm not bombarded by emails during my focused writing sessions.
Wear Headphones
I tend to get distracted by loud sounds in the environment. Wearing noise-cancelling headphones is a necessity for me. What helps me as well is putting on some playlist. There are awesome focus playlists on YouTube. After some time, your brain will automatically start focusing because the music is a signal that a work session is about to start.
If you work better in silence, do that. Always remember that it's about individual preferences. Experiment!
The Frame: Build A System
Set a Deadline
This one works wonders. Don't just let fate set a finish line for a project. "No deadline" is synonymous for "will never get done".
Even though I might not have the best track record for the longest blog posts, I published one blog post every week. If I look back now, it's only thanks to me setting a deadline for when the new blog post has to see the light of electrical circuits.
Don't Overengineer It
Even though I've been writing for over a year, I still try out new writing software from time to time. It's good to be on the lookout for the best tools to use, but you can overdo it.
That's what happened to me.
After writing in Notion for almost a year, I decided to switch to Hemingway Editor. I like using Hemingway. It has more of a "writey" feel to it. But this came at too much of a cost: every time I'd export the text from Hemingway, it would destroy the formatting. Also, you can't post graphics into the text. This might be good for distractibility to some point, but it gets annoying when you have "INSERT PICTURE XY HERE" between paragraphs.
Because I switched software because I thought it looked nicer, it made the posting process much more error-prone and longer than when I just wrote in Notion.
Engineering a process can also be a hidden form of procrastination. Only doing the thing is doing thing, like Chris Williamson says in this brilliant post right here:
Chris Williamson
Gamification
How original, I know. I'm not the first one to use this metaphor. I won't be the last one.
But there's a reason gamification pops up time and time again: it works.
I still think there's a good point to be made that video game designers understand human psychology better than many psychologists.
At least the hijacking-your-attention part. Or more accurately, the goal-seeking part of your brain.
Very bad. Boohoo.
But instead of getting angry at these people, how can use their methods to our advantage?
This part deserves a blog post by itself, but here's the TL;DR of it:
Track the progress to your goal.
What works for me is setting myself a goal when it comes to word count. Since the goal is to not write a novel in the last 24 hours before its due date, the game system must prioritize consistency. Don't go all crazy and set an almost unreachable goal. Something like "write 5000 words a day so you can finish a novel within two weeks" is an insurmountable goal. Insurmountable goals aren't inspiring. They're procrastination magnets. Start with a simple, first step.
Writing is an art form where usually less is more. That might speak against tracking word count as a success metric, but it's the most accessible we have. The goal is momentum, otherwise we're stuck in overengineering-hell again.
This success metric worked like a charm for me in the past:
"Write 500 words once a day"
I always end up writing more. Sometimes 600 words. Many times more than 750 words. This adds up over time. And because you've tracked your progress, this gets much more fun than before.
The Roof: Celebrate
You're not here to just work, work, and work some more. That's not what life is for. Sometimes, it's so easy to forget one simple thing: celebrate your victories.
Our losses get much more attention than our wins. This is good to some degree, because you learn a lot out of failure success could never teach you. But we shouldn't put failure on such a high pedestal so we forget to count our wins. If you only focus on the bad so you can become even better in the future, you will never reap the rewards of your wins.
Even though I don't have many subscribers, scrolling through my personal website (shameless plug here: https://tommytribolet.com) gives me a reason to be confident. I stuck to something most people would never dare to attempt.
Your writing practice might not be your favorite thing to do, sometimes it might even seem as a huge waste of time. But what if it's exactly what gives you the confidence to pursue something you love you were too scared of before?
The Bottom Line
Now that I think of it, all of these tips are applicable for any project, ever. It's about getting things done. Doing things. Agency. Only then your dreams can become reality. Otherwise, they stay dreams, and dreams without action are just nice fantasies.
Don't live inside a fantasy, make them a reality by taking action.