
Show HN: Write every day, measure your progress, achieve your writing goals - rayalez
https://writingstreak.io/?src=hn
======
jurassic
I've been reading a book called Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini. He dropped a
writing productivity tip he learned from a colleague which is to always stop
in the middle of writing something so that the desire for resolution will pull
you in and get you off to a quick start the next time you sit down to work.
Humans crave resolution.

I do a similar thing with code. Walking away while my code doesn't compile or
a test doesn't pass is the best because when I sit down the next day my
attention is already focused where it needs to be. No time wasted trying to
figure out where I left off or where I should start.

~~~
tropshop
If I walk away in the middle of an unsolved problem, it persists in the back
of my mind and is mentally exhausting. I won't be able to sleep or let go of
the problem; only potential solutions race around my mind.

However, if there is a clear boundary of work accomplished, I break the build
with a simple syntax error and avoid thinking about the next task. I can step
away from work completely, without any lingering thoughts, and the next time I
am back at it, the syntax error helps me jump in right where I left off.

~~~
brett40324
I like the intentional syntax error approach here. That's way better than
times I've done: /* NOTE: you left off here!!! */

~~~
rkangel
I use #error (and on compilers that support it #warning) to leave unignorable
messages over my codebase for things that need doing.

------
phantarch
Cool tool, I really like the idea and workflow it promotes!

Only question I have is about the content I write into your text box. Is it
still mine? Is it private to everyone (even your servers)? Writing is a
personal exercise and can be creatively rewarding, but only if you've got the
confidence that it's still solely _your_ writing and that you control who can
see it and when. The only privacy callout I see in your about section is
regarding other users on the app not being able to see your content. A
paragraph about what you do with the writing I put in your tool would help me
not feel worried that I'm writing with someone over my shoulder who owns my
words as I pen them.

Again, good work so far!

~~~
rayalez
Before you sign up, all of the data is saved in your browser. Technically you
could use it like this indefinitely, but this is mostly for demo purposes, so
some of the functionality won't be available (like sharing data across
devices, email reminders, public profile page). Also if I will make
significant changes to my database in the future, this may cause issues. So
that's not the best solution.

In the future I'm planning to create a desktop app, that might be the perfect
solution if you really don't want your data to leave your computer.

Meanwhile, I can promise you that I will never share your data with anyone.
I'm not using extra sophisticated encryption or anything like that (that would
be an overkill for a writing app), but I'm using Atlas [1] to store your data
(they're really good and competent database as a service provider), and on my
end I've made sure that nobody can read what you wrote without your password.

There's no such thing as flawless security I suppose, but I'm trying to follow
the best practices, so unless you're writing a short story about your social
security number falling in love with your credit card pin code, or a
novelization of NSA's deepest darkest secrets, I wouldn't worry too much about
this =)

[1] [https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas](https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas)

------
rayalez
Hey everyone!

I've just published a beta of my new app for writers, it is a simple tool
meant to help you develop a daily writing habit, track your progress, and
achieve your writing goals.

I'm looking for some feedback:

\- What are your first impressions? Does it look useful?

\- Is the functionality easy to understand?

\- What can I do to make it better? Any ideas on design, functionality,
onboarding, marketing, etc would be very helpful.

\- Any other thoughts/suggestions/advice?

~~~
ChristianGeek
Great idea, but charging more than it costs to get Office365 was an immediate
nope for me.

~~~
rayalez
Well, at the moment I'm giving away free lifetime accounts just for some
helpful feedback or social media sharing =)

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Just from a marketing perspective...

We don't need to know that on your landing page. That's your business plan,
and honestly you might not even follow it.

By the time you get to that point, you may have chosen to go with an ad model,
or you may have added some new features that make this clearly worth $10 per
month, and VERY different from Office 365.

Just remove that bit. Use this space to share with me the appeal of your tool
RIGHT NOW, not the potential cost of your tool at some future point.

I'm excited to try your product. I've been struggling to get into a writing
habit and definitely could use something like this!

------
riskpeep
First impressions:

\- Cool a new writing app. I was looking for one of those (seriously)

\- The first thing i noticed was the content. My eyes totally skipped over the
writing are.

\- I can start typing right away. Yay.

\- I can use google auth. Double Yay!

\- Overall concept is easy to understand and adds value.

Feedback:

\- kudos for releasing. That is a milestone many don't reach.

\- Quite a bit too monochrome. The muted colors take away from the marketing
message. On the landing page, you can get a bit more poppy and save the
mutedness for the actual writing area.

\- Landing page as primary interface is an interesting choice. On the plus
side, you can start writing immediately, which is kind of awesome. On the
other hand, your landing page content describing the hotness feels like so
much clutter as a result.

\- Using the landing page as the primary interface means that the typing area
is quite restricted in size. I saw that you can go full screen, but I just
want to have the rest of my browser window work.

\- Halfway-adaptive design. Your site is smart enough to deal with browser
window resizing, but why force me to a certain maximum width for writing?

\- I like all the writing gamification and timing features

\- The marketing content is presented in a quite dense way. You could add a
lot of white space and get more 'bang' for you work. As it is, so many
features are packed in that individually, they don't get the impact they
deserve.

\- The marketing content comes off a bit too much feature driven. Almost like
it was a feature description from a spec document. You could shorten the text
up and cut it down by half and get more from it.

\- The design aesthetic seems to me a curious mix of muted and restrained, and
yet still feels packed and cluttered. Consider adding some more white space
and softening some edges.

I've got more but this is probably enough to start.

~~~
rayalez
Thank you for great feedback!

\- Many people have mentioned the monochrome scheme. Some like it, some don't,
I've decided that I will add a bright theme as an option.

\- I will work on improving the design of the landing page, making it more
concise and less cluttered. Meanwhile you can click the "About" button in main
menu to hide all that information.

\- The narrow width and a restricted height are a design choice, I figured
it's more convenient to see the whole interface at a glance, when the window
gets too large it's hard to look at all the stats. I think I should add a
setting allowing people to customize this stuff.

\- I will figure out how to write a better copy and improve the general UI
design. I've tried really hard to make it awesome, but I think I'll need to do
better. Maybe I'll ask for some advice from a professional
copywriter/designer.

~~~
ssfrr
FWIW I found your feature descriptions pretty tight and compelling. It was
cool to read through what's available and then pop to the top of the screen to
see it in action (particularly the typewriter and blur modes).

The main thing I didn't get a feel for was how this works as your document
gets longer, or you're working on multiple documents. If you're writing a book
does the whole thing end up being in the same text area and you just scroll
around? Is there a save/load?

------
spodek
I agree writing daily helps, far more than just writing.

I've written at least daily in my blog every day since January 2011. Here are
the 3,000+ posts:
[http://joshuaspodek.com/archives](http://joshuaspodek.com/archives).

Some side benefits: when I applied for a column at Inc. and they asked for
writing samples, I could send them thousands. My book became a bestseller.

The main benefits: thinking more clearly, ability to start new habits, self-
awareness, and many personal leadership/growth things like that.

I've spent nearly zero cash on the habit.

------
dvtrn
"There are three ways to increase your writing productivity: Write more
words."

As a daily journal-er....I'm wary of the idea that writing more words is a
net-gain for writing productivity and favor the school of thought that you
just pick up a pen (or keyboard) and write something for a consistent period
of time, _period_.

Instead of writing more words, rack up more days consecutively where the
conscientious decision to write something-a two sentence blurb about something
interesting on your commute or a two paragraph summary of the day.

Volume will come naturally from this IMO. "Without commitment you'll never
start, without consistency you'll never finish" \- one of my favorite
actors[1]

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2aXT1aYI7k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2aXT1aYI7k)

------
sireat
Well designed site!

I used something similar: 750words.com for a year

within few months the streak turned to torture.

There was no noticeable improvement in my adult writing skills yet I felt
obliged to keep the chain going.

The happiest day of that year was when I mixed up time zones and missed one
day.

Have not written anything seriously since.

~~~
padthai
That is like one Lord of The Rings or six 1984 every two years. A month and
change for Animal Farm. Two months for "man bash".

It sounds like a full time job.

~~~
sireat
It really did not take that long each day maybe 30minutes max.

The problem stemmed from dearth of possible topics.

Thus my writing degenerated into some sort of free association chains
reminiscent of most blogs.

Get those 750 words done and you can get on with your day!

Maybe an Edgar Wallace inspired topic generator would have been handy.

------
kubami
There exists a similar "app" with the same premise:
[http://750words.com/](http://750words.com/)

I used to use it long long time ago. It had other interesting features like
sentiment analysis of entries. You could see for example that you were really
sad that that week in december 2 years ago...

------
tw1010
Hugely underrated in the tech-blogger-sphere: reading books (not audiobooks),
lots of them, and from a wide genre, time, and style spectrum. It's not just
about plowing through the 10,000 hours, it's also about taking inspiration
from really great writers. Writing every day and exclusively listening to non-
fiction won't make much of a dent on your quality graph.

~~~
oculusthrift
why not audiobooks?

~~~
stillworks
Anything that is non-fiction or requires going over some segments more than
once, reading is better than audiobooks.

And actually, even in the case of fiction, some books have had me re-read over
certain parts a few times. For e.g. Three Body Problem has parts which I had
to read over, in contrast all the four Hyperion books were relatively easy to
follow in audio format.

Where possible, I use audio books as a follow up after I have read the text.

But, most non-fiction books (atleast for me) work better in text format where
I can pause, take notes where needed, go over the content again and proceed.

------
beizhia
Personally, I prefer writing on paper to typing on a computer for my own
personal purposes.

Writing with pen and paper just feels more immediate.

I also got some fountain pens a couple years ago, and I made a bit of a hobby
out of it. Having nice tools makes thw work easier, and sorta motivated me to
write more in the first place.

~~~
foo101
I have found that I can type much faster than I can write with pen and paper.
I am curious what you think about that. Do you find writing with pen and paper
equally fast or is it that the speed of writing does not matter while
creative-writing?

Writing on a computer also offers the additional convenience of going back in
the text, and correcting something, restructuring sentences, reorganizing
paragraphs. I find these things to be clumsy while writing with pen and paper.
What are your thoughts regarding this?

Finally, I would like to know why do you find fountain pens nicer than ball-
point pens?

------
tumblen
Hey -

First of all, I really appreciate this! I love the timed sessions that makes
you keep writing.

A few things:

1\. It lost a bunch of my writing. I was writing in zen-mode and went back to
normal mode. I did this a few times. I do not believe I refreshed, but
everything I had just written in zen-mode was lost (what I had from earlier in
normal-mode was still there).

2\. I wish zen-mode didn't automatically go into full-screen mode

3\. I wish I could just have a normal-interface mode with a large writing area
and no instructions below

4\. Am I missing something or is there only 1 writing "document" per day? It
seems like I should be able to save what I've written and start a new piece.
Otherwise it's hard to actually develop any real content there.

Thanks again, this is really cool!

------
archagon
This is quite good. Maybe not the direction you're thinking of taking this,
but it would be nice to have some optional social features; e.g. community
writing prompts, commenting, etc. I used to use a site that would give you a 5
minute writing prompt and then allowed other users to read and comment on the
daily entries. It was really fun and encouraging! I'd love to have an "HN
Daily Writers" group to practice with.

Incidentally, it would also make the subscription a much more compelling value
proposition.

~~~
rayalez
I want writing streak to be a simple tool that does one thing very well, so I
tried to avoid adding a lot of extra functionality.

I have built a project that I think you might find interesting:
[https://fictionhub.io/](https://fictionhub.io/)

It's a writing community where you can post stories, share and receive
feedback, etc.

The idea of making it centered specifically around the daily writing
exercises, prompts, etc is interesting. I might be able to use the fiction hub
platform to make something like that, I'll need to think about it.

------
nyxtom
The visualizations are a really nice way to stay motivated. I have been hoping
to see more of these types of concepts used. The Apple Watch has different
goals that it sets out for long term accomplishments which have helped me plan
out my month better to reach those goals. Following the 30-day cycle is a nice
stepping stone for that. Maybe add more of these types of goals or rewards
like "wrote x words in a day" "7 day streak" "new records" ... Etc.

------
matthiaswh
Hey, this is strikingly similar to a tool I built a number of years ago, and
used personally for some time. All the way down to the color scheme and the
heatmap style calendar. Great job on shipping - something I never did!

My only real immediate feedback is that your initial editor gets drowned out
in the monochrome color scheme among everything else on the page. I had to go
hunting for it. Otherwise the "just start, then create an account" is a great
workflow that I've used successfully in other places. However, most users
don't understand in-browser saving versus saving on your server. I would
recommend making a stronger push toward signing up for an account in order to
save.

In my app I had a feature built to "ramp up" your writing. This was great
because I didn't have to immediately start out writing say, 500 words a day -
I could start small with 50. Once I hit that the counter goes up and the next
day I have to write 60, then 70, and son on. It doesn't have to be linear, but
being able to start small and increase my progress each day was much less
intimidating.

------
jdtang13
This app is nice, but it encourages quantity and noise. Most literate people
don't need to write more. They need to learn how to express themselves
concisely and meaningfully:
[http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit](http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit)

~~~
rayalez
My reasoning is that writing well is a result of high skill, and skill is the
result of practice. The purpose of writingstreak is to help people practice.

~~~
tnolet
Put this in big giant letters on top of your landing page. Many aspiring
writers tend to confuse practice with publishable output. Practice a lot,
output a little.

------
bitwize
Why does everything have to be metrics-driven today? My creative efforts are
the things I _least_ want to subject to metrics and tracking.

~~~
rayalez
"You improve what you measure."

Metrics help me to focus, improve my results, stay motivated. They turn
sometimes difficult and confusing process into a fun game.

Like if you're writing a long novel, or trying to blog regularly - seeing a
measurable, tangible progress is extremely helpful.

That's not for everyone of course, not all people need this, but some people
like it.

~~~
yesenadam
Sure. But also.."When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
measure." (a paraphrase of Goodhart's law)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
jeena
I think I'm missing something, there is no mention about _why_ I should do
that? What's the purpouse? In other topics it's obvious to me, if I'd read
"execise every day" I understand it's for health benefits, to get stronger,
etc. But what do I get from writing every day? Why should I do that? Is it
writing like a diary or a journal or what?

~~~
adoago
Speaking for myself, morning writing has been a very therapeutic and useful
tool for me. I've noticed that on days that I start off with a half-hour of
quiet writing in the morning, my thoughts throughout the day are a little
clearer and I feel more focused.

Here's a good explanation by someone else who does this:
[https://www.chriswinfield.com/morning-
pages/](https://www.chriswinfield.com/morning-pages/)

------
catchmeifyoucan
Sounded promising, so I signed up. Then I realized I didn't really understand
what to write about.

Would be cool if you gave prompts to write about. Also not a huge fan of the
UX. Lot of icons and stuff, got confused a bit.

~~~
johnnyRose
I frequently find myself encountering this problem when I feel like writing.
Ideas to write about would be great - I've never been a great free-writer.

------
kqr
I like many of these ideas, and I'd like an Emacs adaptation. I may start with
this one:

> One very powerful way to break through the writer's block and produce more
> words is to deliberately separate the process of writing from the process of
> editing. To make this easier, you can press Alt+T to turn on the
> "Typewriter" mode. It will disable all the text editing options (backspace,
> delete, select), you will only be able to write. You can also press Alt+B to
> blur the text you're typing, this will prevent you from rereading what you
> wrote.

~~~
Fnoord
Less is sometimes more.

I'd also suggest mindfulness for writers block. Can't write? Meditate instead.
Afterwards, you'll feel much more focussed.

------
tenkabuto
I quite like the visualizations, but I'm not too interested in writing on a
new site. I feel inspired to try my hand at making similar visualizations of
the commits I make to my wikis (blogs), inspired also by cw and
[http://composition.al/blog/2017/11/29/the-power-of-
blogging-...](http://composition.al/blog/2017/11/29/the-power-of-blogging-
with-plain-old-versioned-text/)

------
ChristianBundy
Interesting, the UI reminds me of
[https://flowdash.co/app/about](https://flowdash.co/app/about)

~~~
rayalez
Whoah what an awesome app. I'll learn a lot from this, thanks for sharing!

------
aaavl2821
Nice! Have seen others comment that they have trouble knowing what to write
about. Maybe could add a feature where people can save writing topic ideas.
When I'm in a creative mood I have more topics than I can write about, but
there are times I don't know what to write

------
leafo
In case anyone is interested in general purpose streaking, I made a website
for people to do any kind of creative streak:
[https://streak.club/](https://streak.club/)

~~~
rayalez
Great job on the site!

I might as well mention that before writing streak I have built a similar
habit tracking app for general types of habits:

[https://helix.startuplab.io/](https://helix.startuplab.io/)

------
cryoshon
this looks pretty cool, i'll give it a shot for a week to help me hit my
personal writing goals outside of my professional work.

i'd enjoy it if there were different aesthetic theme presets. the blue one is
nice,but for late night writing I'd prefer something that was a deep hue of
maroon. black and green or black and white terminal style would be great also.

font control would be nice, too.

you should also add a link to the main menu from the "profile" page, it's hard
to navigate back as it is now.

PS: i sent you an email requesting the lifetime membership.

------
akrasuski1
The decreasing health bar looks like a really weird idea. I don't like to be
forced into thinking fast, I prefer to make a clear point even if it takes
longer.

------
Aditya_Garg
To offer a different perspective from others, I really like the monochromatic
theme of your landing page and its what drew me into reading the rest of the
pitch.

------
spraak
I've used a more generalized heat map visualization app called
everydaycheck.com which I quite like

------
mxuribe
The metrics and the motivational features are really neat, and well thought
out. Kudos!

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
I like writing pen-in-hand into a notebook on my porch, with a crisp, cold
beer on the railing. A cool, soothing breeze passing by. Recollecting what
happened each day. Because only computers are for work.

~~~
Analemma_
I also prefer writing by hand, but this does bring up a possible feature
suggestion for the OP: manual input of your word count, in case you want to
use something other than the built-in editor.

------
iajrz
I'd buy this if it was a wordpress plugin.

------
codesternews
how private this tool is? Can you check my content or data?

------
matte_black
The only writing habit I have that I can do nearly everyday without effort is
writing comments on HN. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing.

