Procrastination and writing

Never have I ever got off track so quickly as with this Substack

This Substack is a log of my learning, remember? So, here’s one – writing daily turned out to be even harder than I anticipated. I’m laying out my thought process and behaviour changes on the way to writing my commercial open source pricing series.

Turns out I’m no Leo Tolstoy

Yours truly during a writer’s block

I did not plan for particular writing cadence, but some free hours and initial rush of interest set me on 4 articles in the first week. Of course, I could not keep this pace and went into procrastination mode.

It feels very similar to strength training:

• I hate both processes but trust that they will make my life better, be it additional health points, better looks, brain dumping, job interviews or just a new skill;

• Both are hard new behaviours where cramming (my preferred learning mode) doesn’t work. You cannot lift weights or write in batches — at least if the goal is long-term behaviour changes;

• Both feel possible to overdo — it’s easy to get extremely sore or get bored of writing, at least for me;

• Both require persistence and are hard for me to pull off regularly.

At work, I would delegate or outsource such a task. I feel there’s no point and joy in doing the same stuff over and over again and that my time will be better used on new things that are still hard.

At the same time, “being persistent” is still a hard thing for me, so why not approach it the same way as any thing that doesn’t scale yet?

Diagnostics & next steps

Here are my reflections and ideas for improvement:

1. I rushed into writing when I should have taken it easy. Research and compiling sentences takes a lot of time and I just could not squeeze it in the schedule. Now, I’ll push myself to do 2 pieces a week.

2. I did not have a set time or place for writing, which made it hard to focus. This means I’ll block some time twice a week. At the same time, it seems that doing <100% of biweekly piece daily would be better. Time of day is also an issue. I scheduled writing at the end of my day, but I get distracted by Slack/Telegram email. At the same time, the mornings are already packed with training and having two pressing tasks next to each other seems scary.

3. I did not reward myself for writing. At the same time, I try to cut sugar as much as possible. I can allow me some cake in exchange for new posts. 16-year old me would be proud of writing from an expat cafe during roaring twenties, though it’s not Paris and I’m not Hemingway.

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So, from this week on, I’ll make only 2 new pieces a week while submerging myself in a cherry pie.