So, I haven’t been writing or blogging at all for the past, what, month?  6 weeks?  Something embarrassingly long.   So, I thought I would restart this habit, and do a public postmortem of why it failed the first time around.

I had two separate, but related habits for this year- the first was to blog 3x per week, and the other was to write 30 minutes each day for myself (not work related).  I’m going to talk about the writing one today and the blogging one later in the week.

Writing 30 minutes every day

Initially, I thought the writing would mostly be blog related, but I expected that eventually there would be space to work on a book or some sort of writing that would become a second source of income.  I also wanted to create more this year, and I thought that writing would be a natural and easy way for me to express myself.  So this tied in to two bigger picture goals (second source of income and creating) that I set for myself.

So why did setting this habit fail?  There are two things I identified.

1.  No solid home on my calendar.  I didn’t like writing in the evening, because I was tired after work and it felt more like a chore that had to be accomplished before I could do something fun (like surf the internet).  I moved it on my calendar to the morning before work, but I never actually managed to write in the morning.  I mostly overslept and had no time to sit down and write.  Then I didn’t do it at night because I already over-scheduled myself there as well.  🙂
2. Weak sense of reward or accomplishment.  I had a few different things in place to provide a reward.  I’m unusually motivated by checking things off a list or getting a sticker or whatever other trick you would use to motivate a 5-year old.  So, I set it up as a recurring task on my on-line habit tracker (I’m using Habitica currently) and I wrote it on my planner as an entire block of time that could be colored in when completed (yeah, weird, but this is almost as motivating as a sticker to me).  Apparently neither of these are sufficiently motivating given the magnitude of the task.  I also thought that starting a blog would serve as accountability.  However, the only people who read my blog are spammers and that is (unsurprisingly) fairly demotivating.

So, I am approaching this in two ways since there are two problems.  First, massive bribery.  I like pen and paper and ink, but I realized that my rate of purchasing these items vastly outstripped the rate I used said items.  So I’m on a temporary ban until I use up some supplies.  If I successfully write for 7 days in a row, then I get to buy some fountain pen inks for myself.  I already loaded my online shopping cart  with an excessive amount of ink- all I have to do is write everyday for a week and many bottles of ink will come my way.  (The bargain is actually that I need to check off all items on Habitica daily to earn the ink, but in practice, most days the only unchecked task is writing/blogging.  I don’t want another habit to slip as I ramp this up.)  The second approach is to put writing back on my calendar in the evening.  While there were a lot of reasons to put it in the morning, it didn’t actually ever happen.  So, hopefully back to evening will work.