Writing more is one of those goals that slowly materialized for me nearing the end of last year to the beginning of this year. It really hit home to me during the annual review period at work earlier this year when I had to struggle through writing many peer, direct report, self and upward reviews. More recently, I was encouraged by others to write more and this finally cemented itself as a personal goal – I want to get comfortable enough with writing such that I can effortlessly capture my thoughts.
This isn’t a new goal for me. I’ve tried starting a blog many times in the past, and each time it kind of died out after a couple of posts. The reason for this is simply that I’m lazy, the cost of maintaining a blog was too high.
I have not gotten any less lazy over the years, so I’m going to focus instead on reducing the perceived cost of maintaining a blog by:
- Being less of a perfectionist
- Form the habit of writing
Being less of a perfectionist means that I will worry less and do more. I’ll try to worry less about grammar, wording, sentence structure, being logical, politically correctness… etc. I’m just going to try to keep things simple and improve over time as I write more
Forming a habit of writing means writing more often but in smaller chunks. I’ll also use tricks from The Power of Habits book to set triggers for myself to write more. For example, I almost always take a bath before going to bed – now I’m going to think about stuff to write when I take a bath and then write it after the bath. Well, that’s just an example, not sure how practical that will be but it’s worth a shot.
If I fail, that’s OK too. It’s really not the end of the world if the words I type never reach the rest of the world (or more like the one or two of you who might read this). I’m going to take this in steps, I don’t expect to go from writing almost never to writing daily but I can push the needle ever slightly forward to writing weekly, or monthly… etc.
The kinds of things I want to write about will probably fall into these categories:
- Technical – solutions to a technical challenge from work, code samples… etc.
- Leadership – notes of insights from books I read or personal experiences from work/life
- Goals – and the steps I plan to take to accomplish / track them
- Thought frameworks – mental shortcuts I use when making decisions or thinking about a problem
- Immortality – and other random topics. This probably doesn’t deserve its own list item here but a list with 5 items is far superior to one with 4
Tracking whether I accomplish the goal I set out here should be simple, we’ll just have to look and see if I write with higher frequency after this post.
Do you have a tip or comment to share on this topic? Please share!
Mingdom 
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