Day 99: The Penultimate Entry

Tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow I’ll publish my 100th blog post in 100 consecutive days.

To be honest, I can’t believe I made it. I really expected to miss lots of days. I figured I’d get somewhere between 50 and 75 posts published over this time period.

To say that this is the most consistently I’ve written for my personal blog would be quite the understatement. I’ve tried to do this sort of thing in the past but I’ve never been successful in actually sticking to it. That has me wondering: what was different this time around?

How I Stuck It Out for 100 Days

I think I was able to complete this challenge successfully due to a convergence of factors. There wasn’t any single thing that made it work, there were lots of things that came together. Here in no particular order, are the factors that come to mind:

1. This was a public endeavor. I committed to this project publicly, or at least publicly within the confines of Kinsta.
2. I didn’t do it alone. There were several other folks who were part of this project and who also did a phenomenal job of sticking it out (you should check out their blogs as well: RogerBikes, fauxzen, brianli.com, grant.codes, and KŪLT). Seeing their posts was a regular reminder to keep writing. I also had several of my coworkers post comments on my site; I can’t overstate how much it helped to know that my colleagues were actually reading what I was writing.
3. I didn’t put a lot of pressure on myself. While many posts I’ve written over the last several weeks have been several hundred words, there have also been quite a few that were really really short. I was explicitly ok with that from the get-go.
4. I didn’t demand perfection. Back when I was a freelance writer I was really careful to never publish a piece that included a typo, a misplaced comma, or any other error. I prided myself on delivering perfection. I did the opposite during this project. I just sat down, hammered out my thoughts, gave the post a single proofread, and hit “publish.” No dilly-dallying. Perfection not required. Production is.
5. I cast a wide net. I didn’t limit myself to just a single or a few topics. I’ve written about everything from yard work, to running, to furniture assembly, to parenting, to work hacks. I’ve basically allowed myself to write about whatever is on my mind each day.
6. I preselected a bunch of topics. This is going to seem like it’s a repudiation of the last point, but it really isn’t. Yes, I did cast a wide net and allow myself to write about anything, but I also didn’t expect myself to come up with a new topic out of the blue every single day. If I had something new on my mind, great, but if I didn’t, I was totally ok with just publishing a 50-word log of my workout for that day.
7. I planned ahead. Early on, I found myself struggling for content ideas. So I took a day and did nothing but brainstorm content ideas. Several times over the last few weeks and months I’ve gone back to that list to come up with new content ideas.
8. I have quite a bit of control over how I spend my time. This feels like a cheat code to be honest. I work from home and my work schedule is flexible. That was certainly an advantage going through this process.

What’s the Point?

There isn’t one. I’m just approaching the end of the process and looking back to see what can be gleaned from it. That’s all.

Tomorrow will be my 100th post and I’d rather go out on a routine run log rather than a retrospective, so I’m getting the retrospective out of the way today.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash