I may now write somewhat less than 1,000 words per week

On missing a modest self-imposed goal immediately after imposing it, and what I'm going to do about it (give up)

Nano Banana 2: Three runners on a horizontal track, side view, rendered as bold flat geometric shapes in the style of Fortunato Depero's Italian Futurist poster aesthetic. Left: a starter, body broken into stacked angular shapes leaning forward. Center: a strider, body articulated into flowing repeated outlines spread evenly across the lane. Right: a stumbler, shapes tumbling diagonally toward the ground. Thick parallel force-lines run horizontally behind the figures. Palette: cream, deep red, mustard ochre, black, single accent of teal. Flat digital illustration, solid colors, hard edges, no grain, no texture, vintage poster composition. No text, no letters, no numbers, unmarked track.

I’m one week in and I’ve already missed my goal of publishing 1,000 words per week. In my defense I do have a few hundred words drafted about an idea I’m excited about, plus a bunch more research and notes that just need to be integrated into the final product. But it’s not done, and it’s been over a week, and that was the whole thing I was trying to avoid with this project. Whoops.

What can I learn from this?

First, I’m going to relax the 1,000 word requirement. I’m not sure it does me any good. It’s a completely arbitrary number, and I think it probably encourages bad behaviors and bad writing. If I’m close to my target, I feel compelled to sprint to the finish and my writing gets sloppier. If I’m far from my target, there’s more friction to starting because I need to get over the mental hump of “I’ll do a bunch of work and then probably not even be done at the end” before I start.

I also recognize it now as an instance of an unhealthy behavior pattern in myself: when I get it into my head that something is a good idea (working out, cycling, writing) I am attracted to systems for objectively measuring and tracking my progress in it (power lifting training programs with spreadsheets, Strava). Then I set ambitious goals for myself and usually don’t meet them and give up.

So now I’m just not going to do that. Minimum word count getting in the way of publishing consistently? Poof: it’s gone. When are posts done? When they’re done.

Second, if I’m actually going to publish regularly I’ll need to have a pipeline with more than one project in it at a time. I should probably also have a buffer of a few weeks of “fluff” posts and use them as filling between “passion” posts. There’s a lot of information about how to set up systems like this out there, and I haven’t had a chance to design something I think will work for me yet. It didn’t occur to me that this was something people did when I started last week, but in retrospect I’m kind of surprised it didn’t. (I guess I’d just assumed all writers operated on a single-threaded “ideate → write → publish” loop for some reason?)

I think this is actually a closely related problem to the first. If a deadline is bearing down on me and there’s only one piece in the pipeline, my decisions will be distorted by the pressure and quality will suffer. Then I’ll find myself unable to meet the standards I set for myself. Then I get frustrated by my lack of forward progress and give up. So, I won’t do that either: with a bunch of posts in various stages of cooking at all times every decision can be made with breathing room. When do decisions get made? When the right decision is clear. When do posts graduate from the pipeline? When they’re done.

While researching this, I discovered How I Write, a podcast where working writers are interviewed about exactly this topic. It seems promising from the one-and-a-half episodes I’ve listened to so far! Even though it doesn’t feel great to whiff this early into a new project for myself, I’m also glad that it happened as early as it did because it led me to recognize that something big was missing before I got too burned out.

So: a smaller pile of words, a bigger pile of drafts, and a little less faith in the plan I had a week ago. Check back in a week and we’ll see how much of this new plan survives contact with another seven days.