Month of Focus #1 is done and in the books. Over the course of January I focused on my daily habit of getting some sort of exercise. Specifically, I tried to walk and run as much as I could. It wasn’t a perfect month but I did manage to have a relatively high level of consistency and saw myself improve across a couple metrics.
Moving onto February I’m shifting my attention to a new daily habit, writing. I have long known that I am a better version of myself when I’m writing consistently. Of all the potential creative outlets I could do it’s definitely the one I’m most skilled at and derive the most satisfaction from doing. It acts as the best conduit I have for channeling diffuse feelings of unease or frustration or confusion into something more useful. Just as nobody has ever regretted going for a run or getting some exercise I’ve never regretted spending some time writing.
While the therapeutic benefits of writing are real and valuable enough to make it an important part of my daily routine on its own, writing has also been the cornerstone of nearly every good professional thing that has happened to me. Or at least many of the good things that have happened. I definitely got into grad school on the strength of my writing. I definitely got an interview at Undercurrent back in the day because I had a large body of writing to point to when my actual consulting experience was lacking. Most of the “big breaks” that have happened in the transformation projects I’ve worked on have happened after I sat down and wrote a heartfelt letter to the client about what was going on and what I thought we needed to do.
When I think about the evolution of my career I know that I want writing to play a larger role in it. I love the consulting work I do right now, but I’m not sure I’ll love it forever. I want to write books. I want to write articles for my own website and for magazines and for anywhere else where smart writing is regularly being published. I look at someone like Ben Thompson as both a professional and intellectual role model as someone who makes an independent living primarily off the strength of his writing.
Words are my friends and writing is a salve for my anxious mind.
And just like my real, flesh and blood friends, sometimes I don’t do enough to invite them into my life as much as I should.
So, here I am sitting down and saying that for the month of February I’m gonna write as much as I can. I’m not here to set a bunch of specific goals or make any grand pronouncements about what I will have produced at the end of the month. I just want to spend more time writing this month than I normally do. Just as I had some simple guardrails for last month’s experiment (try to run/walk a lot, everything counts, listen to your body and don’t get hurt you idiot) I need to develop some guardrails for this month:
Write everyday — even a little bit
Don’t worry about hitting a word count
If you have extra time, energy, or attention, write
Public writing is good
Private writing is good too
Try to do it early in the day but don’t be precious about it
That should help keep me on the straight and narrow, methinks.
And since this is a bit of a visioning/chartering exercise, let’s capture some hypotheses about how I think this month is going to go or what I might experience over the next few weeks:
The first week is going to be fun and I’m gonna write all sorts of stuff that I end up sharing with all of you and feeling really proud and happy about it
After the first week I will have exhausted all the really low hanging fruit that I was excited to write about and it’s going to start feeling like a pain in the rear
I’m going to end up writing some really weird shit at some point
Hopefully I’ll break myself out of the habit of only writing things that I can draft and edit in one working session and instead work on some stuff that takes longer to do
At the end of the month I will have written more than I probably have in years and I will also be willing to move onto my next Focus Month
My plan is to keep adding to this Twitter thread with everything I publish over the next month. That’ll be an easy way to follow along if you’re curious about what a focused month of writing ends up looking like.
My name is Sam and I like words. I write them here and at The Deliberateand on Twitter. I also say them into a microphone on my podcast, Fields of Work.