It’s a tricky week for writing—I’m extremely busy and didn’t prepare any posts ahead of time. Fortunately the prompts are here to help! Today I’m tackling the entire “Staying Motivated” week’s worth, since I don’t really think expanding each into its own post would go all that well for me.
I don’t know that I have any general tricks, per se. I think I tend to bang my head against the wall in hopes the wall won’t be the one to prevail. I’d like to say that I think to myself “not trying guarantees failure, keep at it” or something equally poetic, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I definitely have a tendency to sacrifice sleep to get something done, though, and that strategy is only getting worse with age.
Specific to Blaugust, though, the streak—which is absolutely a double-edged sword—has been astoundingly effective.
I wanted to kickstart writing more, as I wrote in the intro post. Given how well I’ve done at consistently writing about something, I’m quite optimistic about settling into a more reasonable cadence after the blognanza ends. I think that if I found a few hours every week to do some sort of writing, and published something worthwhile on average more than once per month, I’d be pretty stoked, and that feels very doable.
The completionist in me is beyond excited to get all the badges, for sure. And the rest of me hopes that the hangup of only wanting to post epic pieces is significantly weakened, and I can just post what I want to post, even if it doesn’t stand a real chance of changing the world, which the forced “lower quality” of some of my Blaugust posts ought to achieve.
Frankly, I’m not entirely sure.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, first in Serbian and then in English. I used to read like a fiend, too.
As I got older, I effectively stopped reading, and I’ve been trying to pick it back up for years, but it’s hard. For whatever reason, however, I kept writing. It’s mostly been blogging, but I also journal, write as much software documentation as I can justify, and generally enjoy typing things of all sorts.
I’m absolutely, positively thrilled. This is the 26th post on the 26th day, and I’m immensely proud of myself for keeping it up, but also for keeping in mind that this pace is unsustainable and undesirable in the long run, and that I will adjust it as soon as we’re done here.
10/10, no notes.
Ha, I used to set goals of this sort regularly, and in the end it didn’t seem to make much difference. I’m sure the vague scope and expansive time frame of those was generally unhelpful, so I think that serves better as an example of what not to do than something that may lead to success.
Hefty as the daily posting goal for Blaugust is, it’s made it very top-of-mind. I think goals only make sense if one doesn’t literally forget them, which I’ve done plenty with the aforementioned ones I’ve posted about here.
I think I can take some lessons from Blaugust and apply them elsewhere, namely to scope my goals tighter in general.
I sure did, and I shared them three times already. I’ll add the final sharing post here once it goes live.
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