Week 1: A New Writing.AI Routine
For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to write regularly. Both as a personal exercise, to connect with my thoughts, and as a professional exercise, to put my ideas out there for feedback, criticisms, or just as a general matter of giving back. This hasn’t been an easy thing for me, because I don’t particularly enjoy writing.
To address this issue, I’ve decided to start using Writing.AI on a weekly basis to produce content that I’ll go ahead and publish. This will help me test and improve the system while at the same time kicking my writing habit into gear.
I’ve had a few false starts in the past when it comes to writing regularly. There was the ‘Daily Prolific’ effort I started in grad school that fizzled out after a week or so. My goal there was to simply type up a page each day with my thoughts, learnings, etc.
This seemed like a good way to jump start my writing habit, because it was a relatively small amount of content to produce.
However, the frequency I had aimed for was far too high (especially during that year of my life) and I had no accountability to anyone other than myself. In short, it was a doomed effort from the start.
Several years later, I bought a nice journal and started putting my thoughts down in it. This wasn’t a dramatic change from my regular daily routine, since I usually jot down a few pages of notes while I’m working through whatever problem I’ve taken on for the day.
The journal offered the benefit that it was natural to work with, being a physical object, and I felt free to share my thoughts more freely on topics that had little to do with my day-to-day work.
Unfortunately, over time I found that I would rarely write in my journal unless I had a pressing personal decision weighing on my mind that I needed to work through. This didn’t happen very often, so the journaling approach to get myself writing more also fell apart to a large extent. Lack of routine and, again, lack of accountability for writing regularly also contributed.
For a few years after this point, I didn’t think much about writing beyond my regular habits.
Skipping ahead to the present day, I’m starting anew.
At the end of this process, I hope to have established a new writing routine, exposed a bunch of my thoughts to the world, and made dramatic improvements to Writing.AI.
Some of the improvements to Writing.AI I’ll be tracking have to do with how productive I can be using the system. That productivity can be measured in terms of how much content I can produce during a given writing session, but also in terms of how organized the final product is. Another element that matters quite a bit is how much resistance I have to starting writing from week to week.
Ideally, Writing.AI will prove to be an approachable ally in writing that makes the process far less painful than it would be if I were just staring at a blank page. The current version is a getting there, but developing a voice and personality for the system is still a work in progress.
Having learned a few things from my past efforts, I’m kicking off this process with (1) a reasonable scope; and (2) some public accountability:
For the next eight weeks, I’ll be using Writing.AI to write and publish weekly about whatever comes to mind. I will write at least one article each week, but may publish several pieces depending on how many different writing styles I’d like to test fully.
So this is it, my first real effort to write a public piece using Writing.AI from start to finish. I sat down about 35 minutes ago and started a new ‘Announcement’. I’ve answered a bunch of questions about the announcement, and have yet to see what the system generates. I’m hoping it’ll make sense, because I’m planning to publish it more or less as-is.
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