Progress
I read that Jerry Seinfeld made a personal pledge to write a thousand words a day to help generate ideas for new jokes. He would essentially keep an unbroken chain of activity to encourage him to write more and with more regularity. It helps to have something to shoot for when going for long-term achievements. I can tell you from experience that it’s easier to have perfect attendance than it is to miss a few days here and there, because that makes going today a big deal. The quality of his writing was higher than if he did everything in short bursts because he balanced out his writing over time. At a thousand words a day, he was writing 365,000 words a year! Granted, it’s unedited, but just producing that kind of volume seems like a great way to generate ideas. You’re constantly listening to your mind to see what else is out there, and consuming information to have something to churn on.
If I know what I am going to write about, a thousand words can be pretty well-written in about forty-five minutes. It’s about two pages of 12 font, given the length of words and whitespace that I typically use. So this page is my own small way of tracking this goal in a public space. One of my ideas was to create a web app to do personal tracking like this, and someone implemented a version here.
My goal for now is to have a minimum 500 words of personal writing per day, and a minimum of 100 words of blog writing per diem. This doesn’t mean that I’m posting 100 words a day, just writing at least 100 words intended to eventually publish. So this could be a 700 word post a week. That seems pretty nice. I can go higher, but the goal is more consistency of writing than it is volume at first. So, if I follow this plan, I should have at least 182500 words of personal writing and 36500 words in the blog after a year. Not too shabby. Obviously I will be considering quality as well as quantity.
Update 20081125 – I had a brief stretch last week where getting the time or energy to write was difficult, but I feel like I’m back on track now. I blame this mostly on doing a lot of things outside of work, but those seem to have abated. It’s fascinating, I considered that at some point I would run out of things to write about, but keeping that volume has actually encouraged new ideas. Also, it means that my input streams are constantly being exhausted, which forces me to seek out other opportunities to have something interesting to write about. The few days that I missed I was acutely aware of this. I also have explored writing my thoughts down as I have them instead of just at the beginning or end of the day, and this seems to work well because the thoughts have energy right then, whereas they are dissipated if I wait. Sometimes I might even lose the thoughts, so it’s best to capture them in some way at least. I wish that I had a capture device for when I was in the car. I suppose a new phone would help out with that.
Note 20081126 – “Running is a big question mark that’s there each and every day. It asks you, ‘Are you going to be a wimp or are you going to be strong today?’” – Peter Maher, Canadian marathon runner
The same can be said for writing on a regular basis.
Note 20090806 – It’s very tough to write 500 words consistently over a long period of time. I think that I was a bit hard on myself for awhile for not keeping up with this, but now that I look back on it, it was probably just too much writing based on the amount of living that I was doing. When living and thinking exceed writing, thoughts and events are not captured. When the opposite happens, writing stagnates. I’d personally rather live a little more than write a little more. I’m keeping the above section around as a small inspiration.
I think the real key to feeling fulfilled is doing something each day. Instead of sitting down to write for an hour a day, I just try to write when I have something to say. I think this is because the energy is highest at this time. I could be sitting at a restaurant or working or reading or driving in the car, and I just take out my cell phone or open up a text editor and write what is on my mind. I’ve been working on reducing my work in progress a little, but the Fieldstone method of writing likes having multiple things in progress. There’s a creative me that likes things open, and then there’s a practical me that likes things to be finished quickly. I suspect a compromise will be reached.
20091221
I think my attitude on this has shifted again. Instead of focusing on words per day, I’m thinking about some effort per day. It could be updating a link, writing a paragraph, deleting some text, and so forth. My actual output should be what I am measuring, not the words that I have in my inventory. From a lean perspective, I think that this makes sense. Measuring words per day is the equivalent of measuring success by the number of lines of code you wrote today. I have a spreadsheet that is tracking this minimum effort level, but I don’t really feel like publishing it. While publishing the spreadsheet of effort was effective in having social accountability, I doubt that anyone looked at it and it was kind of demotivating over time. So I will just stick with what I am doing. My previous numbers are still in the spreadsheet for all to see.
