
Write every day - ostrowski
http://mlafeldt.github.io/blog/write-every-day/
======
shubhamjain
Code everyday, contribute to open source, write n words everyday, read books
everyday, exercise, learn new skills, market yourself, socialize, travel. Is
there an end? I am surrounded by so many productive activities and each one
within my reach that each time I am not doing it, it feels I am frittering
away very valuable time. In fact, even when I am doing it like reading a book,
I feel working on my mini-game could have been more productive.

Someone has written 40K words in five months, someone has created a kernel at
the age of 18, someone has made 365 days streak on github and someone has done
a biking trip across India. I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling
guilty when you see other people's achievements.

~~~
wiremine
I second this: reading all this can create a sense of guilt.

I think for myself, the key is knowing that the guy who biked across India
wasn't writing a novel. Or at least, he wasn't biking across India, writing a
novel, and maintaining a 40+ hour job and raising a family.

I'm a husband, father of two kids, am involved in my church, and own a house
with a yard. So, "contributing to open source" and "writing every day" or
"learning a new skill" is #5 on my list. Probably further down the list if I
think about it.

That said, I think it is possible to do _one_ of those things well on a
regular basis. Right now I'm learning a new programming language. Before that
I was reading a number of books.

Bottom line: it starts with knowing your own personal bandwidth limits, and
knowing your prioritizes. Then backfill with the rest.

~~~
tragic
> I think for myself, the key is knowing that the guy who biked across India
> wasn't writing a novel. Or at least, he wasn't biking across India, writing
> a novel, and maintaining a 40+ hour job and raising a family.

Well exactly.

A bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that (to sicken the GP) I
write at least 30000 words every 5 months - and that's with a time investment
of 3-5 hours on a Tuesday evening (I write commentary for a weekly paper). I
could hit eighty or ninety thousand if I didn't like video games and talking
to my girlfriend etc. There's no magic there - my dad is a writer, and when I
was 6 I wanted to Be Like Him, and ever since I've enjoyed writing. You do
that for 22 years, you pick up some speed and style.

On the other hand, whenever I think "I need to contribute to
$OPEN_SOURCE_PROJECT", I suffer immediately from 'don't know where to start'
paralysis, and usually give up pretty quickly.

Nobody's ever going to be confident at everything.

EDIT: The other thing is sort of 'confirmation bias' \- stuff you're very
productive at feels very easy, so you don't notice the productivity so much as
you feel acutely useless at things which feel difficult.

~~~
justysebitcoin
You don't contribute to open source because you think you need to contribute
to open source. That only leads to "don't know where to start" paralysis.

You contribute to an open source project because it had a bug or lacked a
feature you needed and you took care of it. There is no paralysis when you
have laser-focus on a particular problem.

------
smokel
I agree that writing is good exercise.

However, it seems that some people think that achieving a high word count is a
good thing. Please try to use as few words as possible to get your ideas
across. See this as a friendly gesture to your audience, saving them time.

Obviously, this does not hold for novels and fiction, where the reader
actually likes to read. Perhaps I am a bit misguided in thinking that
(technical) blog posts do not belong to this category.

~~~
elorant
As a matter of fact it should hold especially for novels and fiction. I hate
it when I have to read 600 pages to reach the end of a book that could very
well be written in 400. Most novels my dad has in his library dating back a
few decades were between 250 and 350 pages. Nowadays they’re 50% bigger and
the trend keeps going. War and Peace was 1.200 pages long and now the average
fiction trilogy is way beyond that.

------
lettergram
I actually did the same thing, but I use it solely as a way to expand my
knowledge (as opposed to writing better, feeling better, etc.).

It actually helped a lot and my memory is very sharp when it comes to articles
I have written. Writing it in a blog style, I could link articles and in turn
(I imagine it like this) in my brain link the knowledge in a given article to
other articles. It actually has worked quite well because I can remember what
articles I have written, and what are linked inside each one, giving me
excellent recall.

I wrote about that, here: [http://austingwalters.com/learning-through-
blogging/](http://austingwalters.com/learning-through-blogging/)

Some of the websites I write at are:

[http://ausitngwalters.com](http://ausitngwalters.com)

[http://topfinancialadvisor.org](http://topfinancialadvisor.org)

[http://synaptitude.me](http://synaptitude.me)

are just a few. I chose to write in different place so I didn't have to tell
anyone I am writing daily, and I could branch subjects.

I recommend keeping up with the writing, it helps a lot.

------
yellow_and_gray
Writing doesn't just make you a better thinker. It turns you into a different
person. Writing daily turns you into a different person daily.

The most interesting result of writing daily is you start to have _different_
kinds of thoughts. You start to pay attention to things you didn't consciously
think of before, come to conclusions, and that habit changes what you think of
from thereon.

The most surprising result is this way of thinking subconsciously becomes
second nature within a year. It doesn't feel like trying.

edit: rewriting

------
spodek
> I truly believe that getting into the habit of writing consistently was one
> of the best decisions I’ve made this year. This post explores the reasons
> why I care about writing and keep doing it every day. I hope it inspires you
> to write (more) too.

I agree!

I've written every day on my blog since January 2011, nearly 1,600 posts.
Technically, I _post_ every day, so during my trips to North Korea I wrote and
scheduled two weeks of posts before going, for example. The benefits are huge
-- beyond thinking differently and more discipline, finding clients and
developing new ideas, which have led to the classes and seminars I lead, etc.

I've also done burpees every day since December 2011, passing 1,000 days
without missing any. I started at ten per day and worked up to two sets of
twenty-five per day and find myself as fit at 43 as when I competed in
Ultimate Frisbee at Nationals over a decade ago.

Writing and burpees are great, but nearly any daily challenging activity you
choose to do will bring great benefits. I call such activities SIDCHAs, for
self-imposed daily challenging healthy activities --
[http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/self-imposed-daily-
cha...](http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/self-imposed-daily-challenging-
healthy-activity-sidcha-series). Most of what the author wrote about writing
applies to other SIDCHAs in their way.

Meditation, yoga, lifting weights, practicing social skills, writing ten
business ideas per day, cooking a fantastic meal per day, taking cold showers
(which I also do, though every fourth day now, after doing thirty days
straight of them), and so on all qualify in different ways.

Your habits define major parts of you, all the more the daily challenging
ones, as does their lack. SIDCHAs train you in discipline and dedication that
you end up applying everywhere else.

Words I live by: "If you miss one day you can miss two. If you miss two, it's
all over." \--
[http://joshuaspodek.com/archives](http://joshuaspodek.com/archives).

~~~
Ixiaus
This is where "environment structuring" becomes very effective - if you _want_
to establish the habits but you find yourself missing days or being sporadic,
it's most likely because your environment isn't structured to support it.

That can mean everything from having a comfortable place conducive to {writing
| reading | meditating} to making sure you create time from friends / women /
family to do your thing. Mornings have always been the best time of the day
for me - waking up early is pretty crucial to this I think.

When you set the tone of your day with discipline, the rest of the day seems
to fall right into place.

------
sireat
I will prove a counterexample to this point.

I used 750words for almost a year but ultimately stopped by accident and have
not been back since.

The "do not break the chain" mechanism kept me going, but there were days when
I had trouble filling out the word count.

In the end I stopped, because it was a hassle and I did not see myself
progressing in skill.

Maybe if you have a clear goal in mind like writing a book with at least some
outline then it would make sense to write every day.

As I was writing mostly random thoughts similar to most blog posts, there was
little coherence in the big picture.

I suppose I was just a want-a-writer having had visions of writing a book
since the age of five.

~~~
ntaso
I have to agree. I always want to start a somewhat personal blog, but I can't
think of many topics. My thoughts are often half-baked, not very original and
once I wrote them down, they tend to be obsolete again, more or less.

I never got paid for writing directly, but then I figured that in a certain
way, I am already a writer. Because I write articles for my business and they
make me money. I didn't rank for a certain keyword two years ago. Then I
ranked. I have this little code snippet that checks which landing page
converted to paying users and I figured that my writing made me _a lot_ of
money, because Google is a major traffic source. So this one article took me
10 hours to write and made me 5,000€ so far.

Odd, isn't it? I can't think of stuff to write about personally, but I do make
money with writing indirectly through my business.

------
atomroflbomber
This reminds me about an idea I had but never really followed: For all you
writers out there, do you think a device with an e-ink display and a normal
keyboard, similar to a laptop, but designed for the sole purpose of
distraction free writing, is something consumers might want?

I always wondered why this does not exist.

~~~
shadeless
There was a discussion about e-ink displays the other day that you may find
interesting:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8327281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8327281)

~~~
atomroflbomber
Thank you, very interesting input!

------
KhalilK
I have been using [http://750words.com/](http://750words.com/) for quite some
time now. Writing first thing in the morning is easier to get accustomed to.

~~~
baby
I wrote my own application in french since 750w was charged after a month:
www.3pages.fr it got pretty famous in France.

~~~
KhalilK
J'aime bien!

What technologies did you use?

~~~
baby
codeigniter, bootstrap, jQuery

Don't think I had to use anything else.

------
bharath28
The part that i really connected with is: "The biggest problem I face, though,
is that I’m a perfectionist. I have a hard time writing shitty first drafts
and postponing editing until after getting something down on paper first.
Instead, I often try to get it “right” the first time, thereby making the
writing process unnecessarily painful. The number of blog posts I’ve published
this year is evidence enough of my struggle."

I've struggled with this too - not necessarily just with writing but with
other undertakings too. I did read the reference that was linked and other
literature connected to this phenomenon. It'd be very interesting to learn
from the OP (or others here), some techniques to overcome this barrier?

------
qwerta
I would recommend not to concentrate on quality too much. Just hire corrector
to do final polishing. Be being perfectionist one can easily build anxiety and
procrastination.

I write daily as well. I have personal wiki I use for planning, diary and
keeping notes. Right now it has about 1 MB of text and 50 MB images. I use
ZIM, they have some nice workflows: [http://zim-
wiki.org/manual/Usage/Getting_Things_Done.html](http://zim-
wiki.org/manual/Usage/Getting_Things_Done.html)

Over time it kind of grows. My main project TODO list has 1500 items. I even
have check list for packing luggage :-)

------
lifeisstillgood
It makes a lot of sense. I like to write documentation (!) but only once I
have the publication flow setup. The knowledge that "someone" will be readin
my docs makes me a but more explicit and more "explain-carefully"

Luckily this means the next time I come back to it amazingly that person who
benefits is me.

But yes - write docs every day, write summaries of your docs every day, write
summaries of the summaries every day. Eventually you have a decent body of
work to draw on.

(This is basis of 1000 words a day meme as well)

------
cyphunk
Heinrich von Kleist wrote some 300 years ago an excellent essay titled The
Expansion of Thought whilst Speaking [1]. Recommended read. Having to
communicate with an external entity expands ones own understanding in ways
that they could not with internal thought alone.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Kleist#On_the_Gra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Kleist#On_the_Gradual_Production_of_Thoughts_Whilst_Speaking)

------
ahmad19526
I'm now going back to my daily writing routine that I've scantily kept up
with. But I have some concerns. How does one improve their quality of writing
when they are not at school? What I mean is, I can write, write, write and I
know after a period of time I'll "better" than I was before. But without
having people who scrutinize your work, who critique your grammar, and do all
the things that teachers used to do for us in our school years, we might only
be able to get so good before we plateau. Am I wrong about this? How do you
know you're writing "correctly" if you don't have the feedback mechanism that
we had in our schooling days -- aka grades, peer reviews, draft 1, draft 2,
etc etc...

I plan on writing for myself and for my blog. But I also know believe that
"Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".

~~~
obstacle1
>But I also know believe that "Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice
makes perfect".

I'd reconsider that position for a number of reasons. Not the least of which
being that it is a logical contradiction.

Nobody is born knowing how to practice things. This is something we learn as
we acquire skills, learn about goals, learn how to channel our energies
towards meeting said goals, etc.

Thus practice is itself a skill that requires practice to develop.

Since our practicing of practicing will necessarily not be perfect, we will
not be "practicing practicing perfectly". So we will _never_ achieve the state
of "perfect practice", and thus we will never be able to make our practicing
"perfect".

Thus the statement "perfect practice makes perfect" becomes equivalent to
"perfection is impossible, since we can never achieve perfect practice".

In my experience people who think like this end up paralyzing themselves with
doubt and never produce anything of value -- not because they are incapable,
but because they think themselves into a cage of inaction. They become so
terrified of not doing things in the "correct" or "perfect" way that they just
end up doing nothing at all.

You can't practice anything perfectly, as you unwittingly proved, so just do
something. If you require external feedback to validate your work, put your
work out publicly and feedback will come. The process is write -> publish ->
critique -> polish, not become perfect writer -> publish -> everyone loves me.

~~~
ahmad19526
Thanks! That was great feedback. I never really thought about that phrase
beyond the surface level. I guess I'll just get writing!

------
overload119
I've read similar posts about writing everyday, and I decided to pick it up a
little over a year ago.

I quickly realized that as a student my day's were simply not that interesting
and my entries looked more and more like "went to school. studied. went home.
slept."

Instead I started writing every week.

This is much more manageable and forces you to take time to reflect on your
life. I look forward to writing every week.

I now have the last year of my life documented in these entries (by the way, I
create a filter and email them to myself with the subject line Write:
MM/DD/YYYY) and it's SO rewarding to go back and read them. It really doesn't
take that long - maybe less than 30 minutes per entry.

I would highly recommend it.

------
edpichler
Once I started an exercise that was to take, at least, one picture every day.
That time I realized how much interesting things happen in just one month.

Now, after reading this article, I'll try to write everyday. I'm still not
aware of the benefits, and if it will be really worthwhile, but in the long
term, I think this can be really really interesting.

------
eccstartup
Most people cannot do it everyday, but I have got a solution -- pick up
everyday. It means you keep the thing you find helpful in mind and try to do
it everyday. Once failed, don't be frustrated, because most people will fail.
What makes sense is that someone can pick that up afterwards to become
someone.

------
neovive
I'm tempted to try this exercise for the remainder of the year. Can someone
recommend a way to not just write, but also learn to write better in the
process. I'm thinking of using Hemingway App.

~~~
bennesvig
Find writing that you love and deconstruct it. What techniques do they use?
How do they tell stories? How do they start/end their writing?

Reading great writing will also influence your own writing as well, especially
if you read before writing. It "primes" you to write in a similar style.

~~~
neovive
Thanks. I've actually been saving links to articles and stories that I
consider well-written for various reasons (flow, style, grammar usage, etc.).

------
jimiwen
how many types of writings is suitable in a day? that is suitable for one's
cognition and creativityness?

Tweets: 30 Evernote: 5 Diary: 1 Book: 1/1000?

------
ireland
Yeah, you should write every day! The author of the blog post should do it
especially: [http://i.imgur.com/GhxPmIh.png](http://i.imgur.com/GhxPmIh.png)

~~~
sejje
From the post:

> I created this file on April 22, 2014. Today, five months later, that
> document contains 40.164 words.

Writing != publishing.

Also he could very well publish in multiple locations.

