100 Posts in 100 Days
It is day 60 of 100 Posts in 100 Days and a couple times this week I BARELY got my post done. That is cause for this edition of reflection and learning.
In my 2nd post, I wrote about Atomic Habits as a source of inspiration for this personal goal/challenge. I shared one of my favorite James Clear quotes:
“You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
The season, my schedule, and my time zones have shifted. School is out for the break and I’m traveling to see family and for professional learning. My routine, my commitments, and my systems are different. Traveling to new places and seeing family I haven’t seen in years provide many temptations to do something other than write and post.
So, I’m employing some different strategies to get it all done. I won’t go so far as to call them systems, because I don’t know if they will be long term practices, but for the short term, they are helping to fill the gap and teaching me something about myself in the process.
Here are two of my new strategies:
- Writing my first draft using the Notes feature on my phone. I don’t love writing on my phone, but I can jot ideas down quickly, whether I have internet connectivity or not. These drafts are easily transferred to my computer for revision, editing, and publishing when I have a little more time.
- Writing in short bursts. I prefer to sit down for at least a few minutes and complete a train of thought. But “writing on the go” has meant that short bursts of writing are more common. Yesterday, one burst was quite literally one sentence. It was over an hour before I returned to the draft and wrote the next thought. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “The journey of 1000 miles begins with one step.” I’m learning that the journey of 100 posts can achieved made word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence.
This second strategy is helping me recognize some of my own time management habits that could stand to be improved. I am not consistently good at using small windows of time, like an unexpected 5-10 minutes before the next event in my schedule, to get things done. I often don’t initiate anything new or continue to make progress on something already started when I don’t think there will be time to finish. But, these short bursts of writing, that are nearly always left unfinished, have shown me how each small step is a move toward completion. I’m realizing that not starting at all makes it easy for me to procrastinate, whereas starting and having the work unfinished brings me back in a hurry. This feels like a good thing to have named and maybe the first step toward a new habit.