Yesterday, I crossed the finish line of my 100 days to offload, having written one post per day every day since the first of January. I am even included in the hall of fame already, which feels surprisingly good. Thanks Kevin for getting this whole idea going!
The reminder to post a text, scheduled to go off at 17:00 if not completed before, is still sitting around in Reminders, waiting for me to decide its fate. It has been a great run, and the reminder has served me well, but I definitely do not want to keep the pressure of publishing something every day on myself indefinitely.
Perhaps the reminder can stay though, as a sort of daily check-in opportunity? Do I want to publish something today? Is there something on my mind today which I would like to put into words, published or not?
Why every day though?
Yeah, why every day? The challenge is about writing 100 posts in a year, dummy! Why make it so intense?
Well, every day works for me. Yes, it is tougher scheduling-wise, but it is also much easier routine-wise. There will be a writing session every single day, so better get into the habit of finding the time for one. If there is little time, you write a shorter post - or see if you can start it earlier. Simple. Every day is the clearest routine of all, no strange exceptions anywhere. Just write, post, repeat.
The good
Writing is fun.
I can still put my mind to it and publish every day. It is not as difficult as one might believe.
Writing more still makes it easier to write more. I get more ideas, and I also feel I have followed up on thoughts and events more often. My blog has - I think - been more blog-like than ever before.
It is very satisfying to publish something every day, link and tag it on Mastodon, and see if it catches anyone else's mind. The social interactions have been a very unexpected and large bonus for me. I expected that the right way for me to do this was in complete silence, only talking about the process once I was finished. Now I have had tons of fun interactions on Mastodon and elsewhere along the way, and also discovered plenty of interesting posts by others I never would have seen otherwise. There are lots of friendly and interesting people out there, the way the internet used to be!
The bad
Publishing every day does take some effort and sometimes a little bit of planning. It is really easy to pick up a bit of negative pressure about it, just one more thing added on top of everything else to get done each day. One positive way I handled this was to actually build up a bit of a buffer. I started a topic list in the beginning, and as usual I may have added more to it than I have removed. For a while in the beginning, I even had placeholder files for the next few days, each with a topic idea.
When life allowed, I got into a pretty nice habit of writing the day's post in the morning and posting it before I started the working day. This had many nice benefits: writing with fresh (okay, frequently still slightly blurry) eyes, having a clear time limit, finishing long before the deadline of the day … It was not completely rare that I would get another post idea during the day and actually start the next day's post somewhere in the afternoon.
Darn, that was a lot of stuff in the positive column, was it not? Back to the downside: that is still a lot of routines and patterns to fit into each and every day. I look forward to having that time and thought energy back and … ideally not spend it on anything else.
Some type of quality may have suffered, although I doubt it. Still, I think I have done fewer posts focused on a certain topic than I usually would, and more of classic posts with a mingle of things going through my head on a certain day. On the other (third?) hand, with my regular publishing pace I would have produced what, maybe ten posts during this period of time? Seen from that perspective, there is definitely just more of everything, and how I sort my posts is hopefully something exactly one person in the entire universe ever thinks about.
Time spent
Sometimes I wish I tracked time a bit more. I know it would go off the rails in one way or another very quickly, but it would still be fun to know right now how much time I have spent writing the 100 posts. I doubt the average time spent is more than an hour, and I also doubt it is less than half an hour. Half an hour per day does not sound like all that much. Still, it would mean 50 hours - more than a work week - spent on writing in the span of 100 days.
Perhaps I need a holiday?