Welp.
That didn’t seem to go very well.
My month of writing as much as humanly possible (actually, I guess I called it a “shit ton”) has come to an end and I can’t help but feel I mostly failed. Before the self-flagellation begins let’s start with the objective facts and then I’ll dive into a bit about what happened and what I think I learned.
This month I wrote approximately 6,000 words (plus whatever this article ends up being) spread across one issue of The Deliberate, one issue of Brave New Work Weekly, two published articles on Medium, and 10 journal entries. I did this writing spread across 13 days. The word output isn’t what’s getting me down — it’s the fact that I basically only managed to write for 50% of the days in a month where my primary focus was to write as much and as consistently as possible.
There were definitely some external factors at play that somehow didn’t manage to make their way into my daydreams about what this month was going to be like (funny how reality has a way nosing it’s way into everything). The past couple months have been perhaps the most hectic and stressful I’ve ever had while working at The Ready. I’m putting in far more hours than I want to be in order to make some (ostensibly) short-term projects successful. We’re expanding our scope at the client, I’ve been leading an initiative to work with external writers at The Ready, and my partner and I have been hiring and training a new member. I’ve also been on the road for much of the past month with trips to NYC, Charleston, SC, and Dallas, TX all happening in the past three weeks.
I don’t share these external forces as excuses. Only as useful context for understanding why it was difficult for me to accomplish what I had set out to do with this experiment.
I had hoped to build a set writing routine into my default day. Perhaps carving out an hour or so in the morning or maybe closing out my day with a strong writing session. I didn’t have strong feelings about when it happened, I just wanted to see myself prioritize writing every day. WIth a 50% completion rate that obviously didn’t really happen. I didn’t really stick with any specific time of day long enough to truly understand whether I could’ve made it work for me. I seem to find it difficult to write first thing in the morning but I’m so cognitively drained by the end of the day evening writing sessions don’t really happen either. It seems that the only way I’ll write as much as I think I could or should is if I bake it into the prime part of my day. Perhaps in calmer times that will be possible but when spinning as many plates as I was this month there was no way I was adding another plate without causing some catastrophic problems for myself.
It wasn’t 100% negative, though. One thing I learned over the past month was that I have an underdeveloped process — and respect — for the brainstorming, planning, researching phase of writing. Early on I wasn’t giving myself credit for days where I simply outlined a potential article or pulled together notes but I quickly realized that was stupid. Writing is more than sitting down and drafting prose and if I don’t give myself mental credit for doing the stuff that allows me to draft then I’m shooting myself in the foot for no good reason. Along with the mental permission to consider outlining/mind mapping a legitimate part of my writing process I also realized I don’t really have a robust process for taking an idea from a nugget to a fleshed out article.
My bailiwick is smallish ideas that can be captured in 1,000–2,000 words. A blog article, basically. I don’t want to just be a blog article writer, though. I want to be able to push an idea across many writing sessions and many rounds of revisions before I share it with the world. If everything I write has to be conceptualized and drafted over the course of one working session then I’m really putting a ceiling on the type, amount, and quality of the writing I can produce. I think I have a newfound respect for figuring out how to do all the work that surrounds a productive session of actually making prose appear on the screen.
In my remaining two “Months of Write” that I have in 2020 (tentatively scheduled for June and October) I have a couple ideas that I’m batting around.
Shooting for a specific word goal.
Working on one “piece” of writing the entire month.
Picking a specific part of my day and making the focus of the month the installation of a writing routine in that part of the day.
Forgoing all public writing for the month and just exploring ideas in complete privacy for a month.
While my guardrails for this month were deliberately broad and pretty vague, I’m wondering if I might benefit from some tighter constraints the next time around.
And while I didn’t hit 100% on this month’s aim of writing everyday I do feel like I learned some things about how I can become a better writer and I’m looking forward to taking another crack at it in a couple months.
I’m Sam and I write about time and attention at The Deliberate and help organizations become more adaptive at The Ready. I Tweet and post really mundane pictures on Instagram.