What I learned writing for 1 hour every day for 60+ days
Prioritizing process over inspiration
On day number eight of sheltering-in-place, I was in a dark place. Over the previous week, I had lost all motivation to do just about anything but read articles about COVID-19. It didn’t seem like there was a reason to do anything. What’s the point? When the world can stop on a dime and change so drastically, so quickly, what hope do we have of making our plans come to fruition?
Everything felt meaningless. After a week of existential crisis, I decided it was time to make meaning out of the circumstances. Hey — wouldn’t it be a great story if I took this opportunity as the impetus to start something that changed my life? What if in 1, 5, or 10 years, I can point back to this period as the moment that something changed?
I also decided that I didn’t have to finish a book or complete some grand project during quarantine to make meaning out of isolation, and in fact putting the pressure on myself to do so would more likely result in crippling anxiety. Instead, I told myself that I wanted to complete three tasks, every day. If I completed these three tasks, no matter what else I did or did not do that day, I would consider it a success. To hold myself accountable, I got out a whiteboard and marker and wrote down my tasks vertically: 1) Meditate for 20 minutes; 2) Write for 1 hour; 3) Floss!
It has been 63 days since that first day, and I haven’t broken the streak for any of these three tasks yet. This is by far the most consistent I’ve ever meditated or flossed, but the biggest difference has been in my writing habits. Previously, I would only write when I “was in the mood,” or on days where the words were coming easily to me. If I wasn’t feeling it, I wouldn’t write. There was always an excuse.
I’ve written over 100 blog posts, a chapter in the book Finding Genius, and about 8,000 words of a sci-fi novel that I originally started in 2016. But all of this was written when I felt like it. I am thankful that outside of academic settings, I have never had a deadline for my writing, and have never had to rely on writing to make money. This is incredibly freeing, and I enjoy writing as a hobby and practice instead of for a living, which I fear would take much of my enjoyment out of it, and add a lot of anxiety and stress. But it also means that I’ve never needed a writing practice or discipline, and have had the luxury to simply write only when I felt like it. So, writing for an hour every day no matter how I felt was a new experiment for me.
There have been plenty of those 63 days where writing for an hour was the last thing I wanted to do (the day that I’m writing this sentence is one of those days). But, my task is not to write a book, or write something I’m going to publish — just to write anything and do nothing else for one hour. While I have made some progress on the novel, I also have a very, very long “scratch sheet,” where some days I just write non-sense that no one will ever see for an hour. I don’t enjoy those days, but they earn me a tally on my white board, and keep the streak alive.
Some days, I’ve been able to go from frustrated and blocked to finding my flow after 20 or 30 minutes of writing garbage just to get through. The biggest win has been allowing myself to write not good-like. Previously, if I didn’t feel like what I was writing was good, I would stop. But making the agreement with myself to write for an hour had nothing to do with quality, just with process. So I’ve written a whole bunch of garbage, and I’m okay — and even happy with myself for doing it. Because sometimes the momentum out of that garbage is the seed of an idea, or a sentence or concept that I really like. And if I didn’t wade through the garbage to get there, I probably would have never found it.
Now, I haven’t finished a novel, haven’t put that much more of my writing out into the world, and so even though I’m writing much more often than I ever had before, my public output has not increased at the same rate. Again, I’m okay with this. The exercise was not meant to increase my public output, but to increase my discipline and process. Knowing that I can make myself sit down and write at any time, and that I don’t have to “be in the mood,” to do so is empowering knowledge to have, and removes my most common excuse to avoid writing. It also means that the writing I do make public is (at least relatively) of higher quality.
Having to write for a full hour also motivates me to do it earlier in the day, so that I can feel as though my work is done. Some days I’ve put it off until nighttime, and have to slog through as I’m tired and miserable, regretting not finishing earlier. On these days, the writing is not very good, because I’ve been having anxiety leading up to it, believing that it won’t be good because I put it off until I was tired in some sort of evil-recursive-writing-logic loop. If I write in the early afternoon, I feel like I’m ahead of schedule and over-achieving. Once I finish, I feel relief, accomplishment, and freedom!
Interestingly, I haven’t really written for more than one hour since I’ve written for at least one hour every day. Before this discipline, if I was “in the mood” and working on something specific, I may write for 2–3 hours or more straight. That hasn’t been the case since I’ve been writing every day. Once my timer goes off, I breath a sigh of relief, finish my thought, and save the rest for the next day. I hope this changes, that some days I want to keep going past my minimum required writing time, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Extrapolated out, if I keep my 1 hour / day minimum of writing going, I would hit 10,000 hours (and consecutive days) when I’m 57. This may sound like a long way out (I’m 30, FYI), but with my previous cadence (writing only when I felt like it), I might never get to 10,000 hours. It’s the Chinese proverb — the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
I will continue to write for one hour a day as long as I can. Some of those days are going to be fucking magical, and I’m going to write the best dialogue or sentence or paragraph that I’ve ever written. Others are going to me sitting in silence, frustrated that I can’t force anything out, looking at the clock every few seconds. But those magical days can only happen on days that I write, so if I write every day, I’ll have more magical days. What I knew before, but didn’t fully appreciate, was that having a writing practice and discipline is a way of increasing the velocity of opportunity. It’s like buying lottery tickets, but the tickets are free (costing only your time), and you get better lottery tickets every time you buy one.
If you’re currently of the “I only write when I’m in the mood” legion of writers like I used to be, I think it’s worth starting a daily habit to see how your writing and attitude about writing changes. Maybe it’s just 30 minutes for 30 days. Anything that starts a habit in which you’ll be forced to write when you really don’t want to. You’ll likely see that you still can, and that at times, the stuff you write when you don’t want to be writing is actually pretty good. I didn’t take time to specifically write this article. I took time to write, and wrote this article. It wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have to be writing anyway. For me, that’s a lesson that good things can come from processes even without inspiration or flow.
Thinking back to day one when I started this exercise, one of the motivators for me was the narrative it would create. What if in five years, I can say that I have written for one hour every day since March 23rd, 2020? That would be an impressive feat that would give some personal meaning to the otherwise meaninglessness of a global pandemic, and probably have a pretty large impact on my life. Well, today I’ve written for at least one hour for 63 days straight. I think that’s a pretty good start.
