When to write

For the first time in sixty-something days, I’m legitimately struggling to upkeep the habit of daily writing. It’s not that I’m losing some battle. But, I have most to write about when I’m undergoing some kind of struggle, in which case writing helps me explore that struggle.

Now has come time to work, and the struggles I undergo can all be fixed from the command line. Hats off to you Seth Godin. I don’t know how you do it.

The habit. That was the important part. The habit is more important than the writing. This started as a “first thing you do when you wake up” type thing. Now it’s devolved into, “let’s wait and see if later might be a good time to write.” But later slips, along with your control over the rest of the day. The morning, you own. It’s all yours. I said I was going to allocate it to code, but that has meant the slow mourning of a useful habit. And as much as I enjoy making progress on other things, I would be truly saddened to lose the progress I’ve made on this. So I’m going to go back to writing first thing in the morning. I’ll just need to find a way to not let it distract the rest of my day.

Wait a minute. It just came to me. The distracting part of writing is the publishing part. The act of writing itself in the morning actually gives me a lot of good energy. I start becoming excitable and thus unfocused when I publish the writing onto the internet.

The solution is then easy:

Write in the morning.
Publish in the evening.

I’ll try that.