Reflecting on writing daily again

I reflected my experience writing daily for a month on October 9, 2024. The experience has been great and I thought I'd reflect on it again because it's almost the end of the year.

Writing daily actually got easier somewhere in the middle of the journey (so far), presumably because I had a lot of thoughts that I was ready to write about. While I'm not running out of ideas on things to write about, articulating them has actually become a bit more difficult recently and I often found myself wasting time on thoughts like "It's been written before.", "I need much more time to make it publishable, so I'll shelve it now.", "Scrap it, it sounds dumb.", and so on.

One thing that obviously hasn't changed is that I'm still as critical of myself and my work as ever. Being critical of oneself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I was hoping that the act of shipping daily would lighten the degree of that criticality a bit, which hasn't happened yet. I have considered checking progress with psychometric tests periodically, but with this one a change in how I feel is really good enough.

Another thing that I was hoping to have less critical initial, instinctive thoughts. That also hasn't really changed but I'm now substantially quicker at remembering the importance of framing those critical thoughts in a constructive way. Maybe that's a good middle ground, and anything else I'll risk becoming a cornucopia of toxic positivity. Although if one can be as positive, empathetic, and constructive like Nikki from Infinity Nikki (surprisingly good game) it wouldn't actually be such a bad idea, but I digress.

I still usually write at night just before the end of the day. There has been a few close-calls where I was tired and almost missed another day. Also, it feels great to publish a post in the morning or early afternoon. The feeling lasts for the rest of the day and is a great source of momentum. That's a habit I'll need to work harder to change.

One thing I no longer fuss about is the tone of my posts. I now write in the style that makes me feel most comfortable when I'm writing a given post.

I also don't worry about repetition of ideas as much now. I was very careful in avoiding that initially — especially on things that I wanted to complain about. I now think it's totally fine to repeat ideas: chances are I'll end up expressing them differently — especially when my views on them have changed. In fact, the blogs that I like and follow repeat core ideas masterfully where repetition manifests as consistency.

Writing about something with the intention to publish it really helps me organise my thoughts on that topic. In fact, writing this reflection sooner would probably have saved me time agonising over whether to continue writing daily or not next year. ( ' ﹋ ' ; ) I'll definitely continue writing daily in the new year. ☀️ 🎉