June will be a month of posting every day
In his 70s, Hokusai spent several years painting the same subject repeatedly: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It resulted in this, one of the most popular Japanese artworks — The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Is it worth updating this website regularly? Definitely yes:
- It helps me develop my thoughts and ideas.
- It keeps a record of what I’ve done, including many of the little experiments, which makes me more efficient because I can refer back to lessons learnt and avoid repeating mistakes.
- Writing things down is a good way to clarify thoughts.
- It helps me stick to goals.
- It’s good to share!
- It’s fun.
But I haven’t been posting here as regularly as I’d like. I’ve done various little projects and experiments recently that I haven’t posted here. And I’ve read books and articles that I haven’t written about. Why? It’s coming up to six months since I made the wonderful productivity breakthrough of making it relatively easy to post to this website. But I haven’t really got into the habit of posting here consistently and regularly. I need to fix that.
A really good way to form new habits is what I call “a month of”. Basically, you just aim to do a particular thing every day for a month. It’s important to be strict with yourself about it, and not to miss a single day in that time. A month is a good period to either make something into a habit, or realize that it’s something that you don’t really want to do regularly at all. So, June will be a month of posting to this website.
I’m a fan of the tech blogger Simon Willison. He is a prolific poster, and last year challenged himself to post every day for a year, which he completed successfully. A year is too much for me—I don’t want to start something I’m not going to finish—but a month works.
Of course it is good to tie habits to other things that I do routinely (what James Clear calls habit stacking). During the working week I do my daily exercise before breakfast, for example. Can I tie the habit of writing posting to something? It’s a difficult one because posts come as a result of a lot of different types of activity—an experiment, a new drawing or creation, reading or learning something. So perhaps the trigger should be those acts? After I have done one of those things, I should always create a post, or at least a draft or outline of one. As a habit trigger goes it’s a little bit vague. An alternative would be to just make sure that I write about everything I do that takes a few hours, and then decide if it is worthy of turning into a post. That could work.
One issue is that there are days when I focus on just doing stuff for clients and don’t have much time to write posts. So I may need to be a bit flexible with timing—rather than being really strict about doing it every day, I could do two posts on the days where I haven’t done one the day before.
I’ll summarize:
- During June I am going to try to post something to this website every day.
- If I don’t manage to post on a particular day, I’ll post two things the next day.
- Every time I spend a few hours doing stuff, I will try to write about it. Some of this might not be worth posting, but it will get me into the habit of writing every time I finish doing something.