Writing it all out
I don’t want to chalk it up to the start of a new year, but it seems like every January I always want to start getting parts of my life more and more situated. With the growing popularity of sites like Zen Habits and Lifehacker—personal productivity blogs—it’s hard not to come across a tip or trick in one of their posts that sounds very easily doable.
One such goal that I’ve recently come across more and more is the notion of writing for 30 minutes every morning (hey, check it out, you’re witnessing me do it right now!). A lot of the motivation behind this goal is a love of writing (and recognizing that I don’t do it enough), but most of it is recognizing that I have so many tools at my disposal that can help me do what I want. Case in point, in doing some quick research online, I found a Freelance Switch article by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame on this very topic.
In his eight tips to help get you motivated to start a writing ritual, the one it seems I need to get way better at is #5—”Clear away all distractions.” I need to not check Google Reader, email and especially not my Twitter stream in the morning. Discipline, discipline, discipline is the name of this game, I’ve realized.
To help me along with my goal (and to satisfy the need for technology being a part of everything I do) I’ve also downloaded the beautifully designed Minutes Mac OS X Dashboard widget (pictured above). I’ve already got a nice paper journal that I occasionally write in, but the widget should help when I’m writing a blog post (or deciding to type into Google Docs).
Some days I’ll be writing on paper and somedays you’ll see the results of that morning on here.
Time’s up!
Good post and suggestions. It’s hard to resist the Twitter!
Hah, definitely. I need to learn to step away from The Twitter as well. :P
You forgot to mention Things! Best app ever to manage your to-do list and become much more productive everyday!
I always say I’m going to write more personal stuff. I’m just usually already behind the second I wake up I end up writing all the other stuff first! I’ve been meaning to wake up my own personal blog for awhile now, I’ll try and do it to it.
@Juan Don’t worry, my post on Things is coming soon. I need to really use it for a while to get a better understanding.
But yeah, so far it’s been great!
I’ve also started to write daily. It was my travel journal that got me into habit while i was abroad. however, i’ve realized that for me, the best way to write every day is to not write blog posts to the public, but just writing to my unpublished self–that way I don’t have to worry about fixing anything, making it valuable to other people, or any of that time-consuming jazz. writing consistently to me is all about clearing my own mind, allowing it to be a source of creativity rather than thought storage/contemplation. however you can get it out the quickest, the better. if you can do public blog posts to accomplish this, then more power to ya. but don’t forget that writing to an audience of one sometimes is the quickest and most effective therapeutic form
[...] be making lots of similar observations as I begin to flesh out this hypothesis as part of my daily writing practice. I’ve not even begun to think this all through and expect to analyze this dichotomy from the [...]