Matthew Lindfield Seager

Matthew Lindfield Seager

Trying to Build a Blogging Habit

A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read.
Mark Twain

I love that quote because it’s funny, it’s true and it can be adapted to so many different situations. Right now, the situation I’m thinking of is blogging:

A blog is something everyone wants to have written, but no one wants to write.
Me

It doesn’t have quite the same punch, but you get the idea. I’ve started many blogs over the years but none of them really stuck. Except that makes it sound like it was the blogs’ fault. A more accurate way to say it would be that I’ve started many blogs over the years but I’ve never really stuck at any of them.

The closest I got was a patch in 2016 when I wrote sixteen(!) posts over the course of a month and a half. I was on fire!!! But then it then took me a year and a half to write the next two posts. :(

There are many contributing factors to my frequent failings in this area but I think the main two are my fickleness, I frequently go through fads, and my lazy-perfectionism, a tendency to want to do things perfectly or else not at all. I’m not particularly pleased with either of those tendencies and so I am working to change them.

To combat my fickleness I am working to slowly but surely build up good habits, starting with small achievable things (like cleaning my teeth every night, not just when I feel like it) and slowly building on them. I’ve found tracking my activity on Apple Watch, and trying to maintain streaks, has led to some better physical habits over the past few years so now I’ve started tracking other streaks using the Streaks app.

So far my goals are:

  • brush my teeth every night (current streak 2, best streak 39)
  • brush my teeth every morning, minimum 5 days a week (current streak 47)
  • do at least five minutes of coding per day, minimum 6 days a week (current streak 2, best streak 25)

I’m also working on being less of a perfectionist, to not only give myself permission to miss a day or two here and there (see the minimums above), but also the permission to put things out there, even if they’re incomplete or embarrassingly bad.

So today I am officially adding another item to my list of regular tasks; to “Post Something to Blog”, at least 6 days a week… even if that’s just a short “Today I Learned” tidbit.