I miss writing every day

When I finished my 100-day writing challenge, I made a point of stopping the daily writing. I had developed the habit so well by that point that it would have been easy to continue, but I wanted there to be a cutoff that clearly delineated the challenge in my mind.

One of the reasons I was able to commit to the challenge in the first place was that I knew it was a limited scope. It wasn’t like I was committing to daily writing “forever”, which I probably would have failed at much sooner. So I wanted to honor that limited scope by not carrying on indefinitely with it.

I want to keep writing, but at the same time, I think it will be more difficult now that I’m not doing it daily. I decided to commit to two posts a week for now, because I knew if I made no commitments, I would probably let other things get in the way and never finish another post.

When I did posts daily, it was just a part of my regular routine to get it done. Even if I didn’t feel like writing, I knew on some level that I would have to sit down and work it out until I had a post. Now that I have more space between the posts, it feels like more time is required to get me back into the mindset.

I think there’s a big psychological difference between something you do daily and things you do regularly but less frequently, especially in creative activities. When you do something daily, you keep it “warm”. Every time you sit down to do it, the last time is close in your memory, so you can draw from the prior feeling of momentum more easily. It creates a sense of flow between days you don’t get if you let the activity go cold, even for a single day.

I’ve actually noticed the same thing writing music. I can really only get good ideas for music after thinking about it for a few consecutive days, and I usually do my best work once I’ve sat down and worked at the piano for a few days in a row.

I still have a lot of thoughts in my head I would like to share. Daily posting might make it easier to get more of them out. But the only way I’ll write daily posts is if I commit to daily posting beforehand, because otherwise I will end up doing other things most days. So perhaps I’ll come up with another posting schedule that is more intermittent but lets me reap the benefits of daily posting again.

Have you ever written daily posts? Did you stop intentionally at some point? Do you find that the things you do daily stay warm in your mind? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.