How I achieved my goal of "writing more"

Recently I wrote about getting comfortable with writing and publishing more frequently on this website. A few people have expressed that they would like to do the same, so I thought I would share some specific things I did to make writing happen for me this year.

I dropped the baggage around “blog post”

I wonder if the term “blog” has too much baggage. Too much history for it to really catch on again and make a dent. -- Chris Coyier

For whatever reason, I struggled with writing “blog posts”. I felt like blog posts had to be complete, good, pieces of writing with structural elements like introductions and conclusions and/or a comprehensive narrative. Then I discovered the concept of digital gardening via Joel Hooks. I started thinking about my notes as works in progress, learning in public rather than complete pieces of work. The mental shift helped me quit overthinking about what I published.

I turned writing into a habit

I have a number of positive habits I try and do every day. Writing for 20 minutes is one of them. I don’t get to it every day, but most days I force myself to sit and write, write literally anything, in my personal notes.

I wrote notes for myself first

If I sit down and write in the mindset of “this is a post for other people to consume”, I start overthinking and overediting. So now I write just for myself. Almost all of the notes published here in the last 6 months started as a private note in my Obsidian vault. When I think I’ve written a note that might be of interest to a public audience, I edit it and add links and context for public consumption, and then I publish.

I practiced writing first and editing second

My natural inclination is to write a sentence 7 times in my head before I even start typing. Then re-write another 4 times in the document before I move on. This makes writing anything painstakingly slow. So I’ve been making a deliberate practice of just writing as many paragraphs as I can without stopping to analyze sentence structure. Then I circle back and edit at the end. This process is much faster! I’m still working on writing like this but I think I have come a long way from where I was.

I reduced the friction around publishing

I’ve set up some automation so I can “sync” a private Obsidian vault note with the markdown files in my Astro website. Now it takes very little time or effort to have something in my personal digital garden show up on my public one at rachsmith.com.