2019-05-09 One Hundred Days of Writing

One Hundred Days Of Writing

Largely inspired by standard notes and this blog post: https://listed.standardnotes.org/@Listed/5202/100-day-writing-challenge

I've also been inspired by a few others:

• 750 Words
• That dude that wrote 1000, 1000 word essays
• Morning pages
• Every other site on journaling

I am starting a journey here today of writing every day for one hundred days. Today is day one, let's see how long it lasts. I think I will easily be able to write every day - the challenge will be 1. How much I write and 2. what the quality will be like. On both of these it doesn't really matter. I kind of plan this blog to be semi anonymous and that's the whole point. What constitutes quality and quantity anyway. For me the benefit is to me and written by me.

I've tried this sort of thing before. Setting myself a target of 750 words a day. This was a slightly different mindset than just writing for 100 days. Firstly the quantity seemed daunting. Perhaps for some people 750 words is easy to bash out. For me by day three I was flagging. Sure I could have written 300 words that would have really benefited, but then the challenge would have failed. 100 days seems much more doable. I could write 10 words a day and still succeed in the challenge right?

I still love my rules and here's a few things I wonder about how I will approach the challenge:

• Will I use this as a journal for the mundane (I kind of do that already)?
• Will I write about just one topic a day or several?
• Will I publish at the end of the day once all my thoughts? are gathered or several times a day as I complete my thoughts?
• Will anyone read this and does it matter? (Why not just publish this privately?

I guess the benefit of just keeping going for 100 days is that some of these unanswered questions will likely pan out in the end. This post (if it is a post) feels a bit like drivel. Which it probably is. It's been nice though to just sit with a coffee and a plain text editor and write out some words. That's why this blog platform "Listed" has appealed to me. Really minimal. Just plain text, exactly my style.

In the day

I've decided that I will write a little about today's musings in an appendix. Why not? It's all writing right? Some of this will be cryptic because frankly I plan to stay a little anonymous here on the web. Some of my thoughts may not be totally inline with the views of others. It's clear that all of us have a "private me" and a "public me" we project different things on different platform.

For LinkedIn: One Hundred Days Of Writing

Inspired by this I will from today write every day for 100 days. Perhaps you think this isn't difficult. After all, we all write every day - emails, tweets, status updates, instant messages. But what is difficult, is to take time out and focus on writing something just for you, offline, simply writing what's on your mind. To you, for you. No audience and no-one judging.

I have been journaling on and off for over nearly two decades (both digitally and with pen and paper). The benefits of this introspective thinking are profound. Not just for today, but for your future self when you look back at past musings. This has been a well recognised benefit by everyone from Michelangelo to Richard Branson. (These are more commonplace books than journals - but still foster the same benefits.)

Setting a writing challenge and finding way to be more committed to journaling is not a new concept for me. I've dabbled with morning pages, 750words, and many other journaling and lifelogging apps and websites. Finally I've settled to just a simple plain text editor. Sitting down with a coffee just typing. The simpler the better. No formatting, no images, no keywords for SEO, no judging, just freeform typing. For me, my 100 day writing challenge isn't about the number of words, or even the quality of those words. It's about just being consistent in taking some time to write and think.

I may chose to publish some of these daily thoughts to LinkedIn or other platforms or not. When one worries about how others perceive their words, they become less authentic. Publishing isn't the goal, writing is.
Anyone else journal daily? Why do you do it and what do you get out of it?

Cheers and all the best,

Mark
[image credit: https://unsplash.com/@andrewtneel]