WritingFlow my experiment for the New Year
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What is WritingFlow?
It’s a platform that has one simple but critical mission. The mission is to get more people to write daily.
Writing each day has been a struggle. In fact, it is still a struggle for me every day. The best way I have found to get over this hurdle is by having an accountability partner.
The aim of the platform is to become your go to writing accountability partner. How does it achieve this?
You set requirements of how many words you should write each day and how much you are willing to pay if you miss a day or the word count.
What kind of accountability partner holds to ransom?!
Well, let’s think of a fictional scenario. John makes a New Year resolution of writing daily. He tries the same tactics most of us have tried. That cool new app, that shiny writing course, etc.
John decides to use WritingFlow. The site asks him to set a commitment amount and the required amount of words each day. He’s confident that he can stick with writing daily this time. He decides to wager his morning latte of $3.50 as his commitment amount and sets a required 1000 word count.
During the first week of January John only meets his requirements of writing for 3 out of the 7 days. John owes $14 for missing his goal.
John begins to miss his morning lattes and decides that he’s going to get back on the bandwagon for the sake of his daily caffeine intake.
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. — Samuel Johnson
The best kind of accountability partners is those that can push ourselves and hold us accountable. Money is the easiest way to bring someone back onto the bandwagon long enough for them to develop a habit. Once the habit is established it is smooth sailing until it is broken.
Isn’t there already dozen writing platforms already?
Most of these focus on providing content to an audience and or building up an audience, like Medium.
There are others that focus just around developing daily writing. I’ve used some of these before, and my most favorite one is called 750words. As the name implies, it tries to get you to write 750 words daily.
The pain I struggled with using this site is that it would initially work but for a shortly lived week at best. Then what will happen is I would miss a day, feel demotivated and give up.
I want to have a tool that helps force me to write daily. I need something policing me to make sure that when I fall off the bandwagon, I get back on. I feel this is a struggle that others have.
How did this come about?
I’ve been tinkering with the idea of creating a side project that would provide a testing ground for some of the research on learning, discipline, and motivation. I have finally settled on an idea that I feel I can bootstrap into a fantastic platform and have it eventually be self-sustainable.
WritingFlow is the project that I have decided to start my journey with in 2017.
Stay tuned, I plan to document the journey as I go along. If you’re interested or think you could be of help in this journey, please get in touch with me.
