Week 1 — ‘Writing Every Day’ Habit Reflection

4 min readJul 7, 2016

Today is the 7th day of my new Write Every Day habit. I wanted to take a moment to write a brief retroactive reflection on the first week.

But let’s be honest it’s also an easy way to get my 7th day in too 😉.

As mentioned in my previous post on why I chose to pick up this habit, the two main things were:

Combat information overload by channelling my thoughts as a moment of mental decluttering.
Opening myself to judgement as a means to resolve other goals.

It’s safe to say that writing every day has had a positive impact on both of these desires but to varying degrees.

The Positive & The Negative

Eliminating distractions and setting aside 30 minutes to an hour each day to write really helps when you’ve got an itching thought or problem on your mind. Dedicated writing time helps the thoughts and analysis flow into more coherent words and stronger arguments. Resolutions and understanding becomes much easier too when you get the chance to break it down both in the writing process but also in the act of writing too.

The downside is it never always works like that. Each and every day is different no matter how adamantly you stick to a daily routine. So sometimes the words have trouble coming out. The thoughts get tangled within one another and I realize I’ve been writing and rewriting the same sentence for the last ten minutes.

Opening myself to judgement through writing every day is a gradual process. I don’t expect this to be extremely apparent for at least a few weeks of consistently sharing my thoughts and experiences in writing. Though a few friends have interacted with this week’s posts on Medium, I shouldn’t expect going from an inactive user to a daily active contributor overnight to spark some sort of attention explosion of sorts. But when you think about it, these are thoughts seem to align with the beginning phases of growth in accepting judgement, no matter how rudimentary they may be.

Improvements and Adjustments to the Habit

There are two things I want to address that are both relevant to the two main purposes for the habit itself.

Balancing quality of the writing & time spent on it.
Content topics covered.

In the last week I’ve limited myself to about 30 minutes to an hour on each piece. Medium estimates that it takes approximately 2–3 minutes to read each one. I think that’s a fine ratio though I’m doubtful that the amount of time spent translates into a quality piece written.

Though the habit is to ‘Write Every Day’, it doesn’t necessarily mean I need to post a new piece every day. I just did the first three days and decided to continue it until I’d given it a full week before doing a reflection and making adjustments.

I’ve been thinking about this particular habit for the last few months, in fact it was one of the candidates on the list of potential first habits in my habit formation experiment. The desire to write was always for reflective and selfish purposes so I never considered reader reception let alone the nature and content of my writing.

After a week of writing pretty much anything that was on my mind (quick list below or in my profile), I noticed the topics shared a similar thread in reflection and self-improvement. Though I really don’t want to be lumped into a million other self-help type folks, I do spend a lot of time reflecting and advising friends and family on personal improvement.

Reducing Frequency and Improving Quality

So all in all, I’d like to adjust a few things and to set a timeline of 2 weeks before doing another reflection and subsequent adjustment if necessary.

Write every day for up to an hour and publish at least one new piece each week.

Here are a few caveats to make for a better experiment and reflection:

I don’t have to work on only one piece of writing each week as long as one new piece is shared each week.
Pragmatism over preaching: provide value to every reader with actionable steps and learning lessons that are easy to understand.
Reference and research both strengthens arguments and helps yourself and readers in combatting information overload.

These three caveats provide all the necessary structure I need to continue growing through this habit while also creating value for others too.

The only issue I haven’t come to terms yet is content focus. I’ll continue to think more about it and organically I’m sure it’ll take form — any suggestions would be much appreciated.