In February I conducted my first Month of Write and was very disappointed. In April I decided to take another crack at it quicker than I had initially planned in order to see if I could get the bad taste of February out of my mouth. Whereas in February I didn’t really have a plan other than “write more,” in April I specifically wanted to see myself get up at 6:00 AM everyday, sit down at my iPad or computer by 6:15, and write consistently from roughly 6:15 to roughly 7:30 (I originally intended to do 7:45 but quickly learned that that end time unnecessarily complicated my mornings).
As you might expect, April went much better than February.
First, a few objective stats:
Words Written: 17,702 (compared to 6,500 in February)
Days Written: 18 (compared to 13 in February)
Published articles/newsletters: 7 (compared to 3 in February)
And now a few subjective reflections:
I started really strong. The first week of this month I was an absolute machine. The routine felt incredible. I felt like a real writer. I was focused and energetic and just so goddamn writerly.
Each week’s writing total went down. The second week was okay, the third week was spotty, and the last week was a travesty.
This decline was not super surprising. The first couple weeks of any new habit are always the easiest. It’s once the novelty starts to wear off that you really start to run into problems.
I started to get distracted by work urgency as the month went on. I had several early morning meetings where it felt like I had to use the time I set aside for writing to prepare. I need to figure out a way to keep my intense job as constrained as possible into normal work hours.
Even as my output tailed off across the month, I did a pretty good job getting up on time everyday. I would just sometimes get sucked into reading or looking at my phone or working on “regular work.”
Finally, I started to wrap my arms around a large writing project in a way that I haven’t in a long, long, long time. I wrote around 7,000 words that I didn’t publish but I’m excited to keep nudging forward.
And a few more lessons (how is a “lesson” different from a “reflection”?):
I created a process for daily writing that I’ve never used before but I really like. Basically, I create a separate file in Ulysses for each day. I then do all of that day’s writing in that sheet, regardless of the “type” of writing I’m doing. At the end of the writing session I can copy and paste what I created into it’s final resting space. For example, a typical day might contain a couple hundred words that are a journal entry that eventually lives in Day One, the first two thirds of an article I’m eventually going to publish on my website, and the beginning of an outline for an issue of The Deliberate. I’ll copy and paste these various chunks to the places they need to go but I’ll leave behind the “master” log of all the writing I do each day.
It’s a really nice way to have a sense of progress since I can see each day’s note in the sidebar and see how many words I wrote.
It lets me set myself up for the next day’s writing by ending each day’s writing session by creating tomorrow’s document and pre-populating it with my ideas or thoughts about what I could write about.
The writing association with Tycho that I’m trying to build is slowly getting stronger. As I tailed off in my productivity last month I realized I had gotten sloppy with putting my headphones on and turning on Tycho as quickly as possible.
I’m really looking forward to the day where I can make writing a larger part of my day job. The only way to do that, though, is to make writing a larger part of the rest of my life. Developing these skills and putting more of my ideas out into the world is what will allow me to eventually make that jump to more of a writing-focused career. The nice thing about my current writing routine, though, is that it’ll serve me just as well now as it will in this fictional future state where I can write all day. So, until then, if it’s between 6:15 and 7:30 in the Eastern American time zone then my butt should be planted in front of my desk, Tycho should be bumping in my ears, and I should be making words appear in Ulysses.
Month of Read
I have four Anchor Habits that I try to do everyday: exercise in some capacity, meditate, write something, and, most enjoyably, read something substantial. We’re now into May and I’ve given each of these habits (and writing twice!), except for reading, a month of their own. The time has finally come to rectify that. Welcome to the first Month of Read of 2020!
This month creates a bit of a conundrum for me. The basic idea was that although I try to do these four Anchor Habits in a minimal capacity everyday, I can be extremely hit or miss on them. I thought that by really focusing on one of them per month would help me get more consistent. And so far, that hypothesis has been right! However, I’m already incredibly consistent with my reading habit. As of this writing I’m rocking. A 62 day streak of having read at least 15 minutes per day. Reading is a part of my day that already feels like a reward and it’s pretty deeply baked into my daily routine.
So, what to do in a month where I’m supposed to really focus on it?
My initial inclination was to give myself a specific focus or restriction. Something like, I can only read fiction, or poetry, or I have to read something deliberately difficult, or read slower, etc. Something that would push me out of my normal comfort zone. However, for each of my other Focus Months where I was focusing on a habit for the first time, I kept it deliberately simple and basically just had the intention of, “Try to do the thing more than I normally would and see how you feel.” So, in the spirit of simplicity I’m going to do the same thing with this Month of Read. I’m just going to read as much as I can (which is kind of what I already do but I’m sure I can find some parts of my day where I could switch over from something low-quality, like browsing Twitter, to reading) and actually track the amount of time I spend reading in a time-based reading log (which is not something I normally do).
At the end of the month I’ll have a better sense of how much time I spend reading in a month where I’m really trying to spend as much time reading as possible. In the remaining two months of 2020 where I’ll focus on reading again, I’ll put some kind of variation or focus or restriction on the intention to make it more interesting.
Feel free to follow along in this Notion card to see how I’m doing during the month: https://www.notion.so/samspurlin/Read-as-much-as-I-can-every-day-3c855fdb064a43fa9e04577663543283