Wow! I can’t believe I published my 100th post already. I never expected to write so much in so little time. I wrote about blogging, writing, productivity, essentialism, health, coding, unix rice, etc. I think I went slightly overboard with creating a niche-less blog. And yet, when I look back at the previous months, it’s not these posts that fascinate me, but the writing journey itself.
I started blogging in January 2024 to write about my hobbies. Yet, I barely wrote about the new hobbies I tried in the first quarter. One such hobby is astronomy. I saw the Moon, Jupiter, and Orion’s Nebula on London’s rare cloudless nights, and I could have written a post on it, but I held back to see more planets and read more books before writing one so that it would be “better”.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Perfectionism was holding me back, and it was Mike’s article, Write 5x more but write 5x less, that brought me back from a two-month hiatus. Otherwise, I might have stopped for good.
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I re-started blogging in April with a new approach. Instead of writing perfect posts, I shifted to writing Atomic Posts. This worked like a charm, and soon I was pumping out posts every other day. I wrote about anything I was involved with: travel diaries, tech hacks, my sickness, and books I read. I maintained the streak for over six months, a great accomplishment for my standards.
The benefit of posting frequently, even of low quality, is that it forces you to create a system. To write more, I had to read more first. As I gained ideas faster than I could write, I began storing them on a second brain that I built on Obsidian. Obsidian slowly became my primary tool for writing, storing, and developing ideas.
Consistency doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a deliberate effort.
I kept tweaking the system to make writing less stressful. I eliminated any issues that slowed publishing: stopped SEO keyword analysis, stopped creating featured images for every post, and separated writing from editing. “Writing more” was my essential blogging intent, and I stayed true to it.
As the months passed, I was amazed by my own consistency. Sure, my writing standards weren’t high, but it still took effort to write bad. Considering I never stuck to a single hobby for so long in the past 5 years, could it be that perhaps I liked writing?
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In the six months of consistent writing, there were two moments when I thought my streak would break, and both involved accommodating visiting family members. I usually wrote on weekends and in my free time after work, both of which got busier as I took my family around the UK on tour. I knew beforehand that I wouldn’t get regular writing time for those 9 weeks, so I was mentally prepared. These were my tests of discipline.
Even though I didn’t get time to write every day, thanks to WordPress’s schedule-post feature, I stayed consistent. On days when I had time, I squeezed in more writing. It helped that I didn’t need to worry about quality.
After overcoming these expected challenges, I grew more confident. The more I wrote, the more I discovered things about myself. Somehow, I wasn’t just writing about my daily life, I was also self-exploring. I began to write more, to take notes, to journal, and to think, and it helped me understand myself better.
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If you tell me to write posts similar to the last 100 for another year, I can easily do it using my existing system. Writing consistently isn’t the challenge anymore, writing well is.
“Writing well” will be much harder than the mechanics of just writing more. I already read a few books on this topic, and frankly, I am not even close to the starting line of high-quality writing. I need to read more (a lot more) and work on building my writing toolbox while keeping my eyes peeled for ways to improve.
With the next 100 posts, I hope to write better than the previous 100. While I don’t know what exactly I will be writing (I have a hunch I will be writing more about Writing), I know it will take longer than writing the bad ones. No more churning out posts every other day. I will have to slow down, and that’s exactly what I want: a slow life.