Twenty days in

Okay so I’m twenty days into this project. Twenty posts looks like a lot more than then. Like it’s starting to look like a project instead of something I sort of am thinking about doing. Here are some unorganized thoughts.

• I planned to have themes for every two weeks (ten posts). It ends up feeling like a stretch for certain topics¹, so I’ll continue with trying to have themes but will shoot for five posts.

• I want to start doing more deliberate practice through some writing exercises. Maybe I’ll type out articles I enjoy, like *Hunter S. Thompson typing out *The Great Gatsby. Except it’ll be me re-typing Grantland (RIP) articles.

• People use the Seinfeld example so often to talk about persistence and habits. Just a pet peeve to see because he never said it. I like the sentiment around it, but I end up questioning accuracy of other stories in a book when that is passed off as fact.

• I’m trying to post daily, not just write daily. I’m getting better at estimating how long it will take. Grabbing excerpts and organizing things takes longer than I expect.

• I’m trying different systems and they all work, some better than others. It might be worth tracking what system I used for each post, but I’m worried about going down a quantified rabbit hole.

• I haven’t told many people about this project at all. I’m posting by finalizing things in a local Jekyll instance. I haven’t been syncing it daily. I imagine I’ll just post them all when I get to #50 or maybe even just the very end.

• Jekyll gives me the urge to re-check previous posts to make sure they built properly. There’s an argument for using WordPress. I’ll write a few posts about the logistics of all this.

• Then again, I’m figuring out a pretty good system for Docs and Jekyll. I can just type the Markdown in Google Docs, making sure to use > to mark excerpts and using the <http://> Markdown shortcut to quickly mark TK’s. (They’ll show up as broken links in Jekyll so I spot them quickly.)

• If there’s a system I need, I think it’d be to somehow have an ongoing list of things to look up when I have free time. Like here’s a list of things. Find matching sources. Find an excerpt. Find the corresponding image. Then they’d update live in the Google Doc.

• I’m planning to continue to 100 posts. Only 1/5th of the way there and I’ve felt like stopping more than I would’ve thought. But I want to see this through. Something good will come of it. I know it. I mean, I’ll learn something. Even if I end up learning that writing for 100 days straight isn’t very useful. I’ll at least have some ideas for a better way to approach learning to write.

• Some resources I’ve enjoyed: The Tim Ferriss podcast (an episode inspired me to kick off this project, so it’s always top of mind), I’d Rather be Writing (I graduated from a human-centered design program that was previously a technical communication program. A technical writing blog is really interesting and seeing an acronym like DITA gives me PTSD except instead of intense flashbacks I get flashbacks of intense boredom. His blog about technical writing is more interesting than reading documentation, I promise.), Reddit /r/writing but then I end up looking at a bunch of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire stuff.

• Writing seems like it’s mostly learning to not be distracted.