I’ve been writing this newsletter in the evening when I finally get around to it and sending it out as soon as I finish a quick edit. (Can you tell? lmk)
Tonight something came up that will replace that time I’ve been using to write. My first thought was “I’ll write this later”, but honestly it’s Friday, Teh Wife is winding down from a busy week and then there’s the Mandelorian and bourbon. So the truth is if I said I would write later, I wouldn’t. I’m lying to myself.
Consistency is a tough thing to stick to.
NaNoWriMo is a month-long sprint to write a novel in 30 days. This year I started strong, but the effort was too grand (and the plot too thin) to keep at it. So I stopped writing. But what would have been better than burning out writing 1667 words every day was to write 100 anyway, whether I felt like it or not.
My treadmill and I got reacquainted today. 438 calories burned. Go me! But will I be down in the basement tomorrow hitting a 400 calorie goal again?
I love the advice: “Start something!”. But that’s almost less important than “Keep going”. 15 days of writing and 1 day on the treadmill do not a habit make. Don’t get me started about the 30 days to a habit, either. I think it can take much longer than that to make something a permanent part of your life.
Whatever it takes, no matter what
I came across a phrase from Mike Vardy at Productivityist.com I hadn’t heard before. “Whatever it takes, no matter what”. Mike assigned that as the axiom for the year and filters everything through that lens.
I see consistency going hand-in-hand with that phrase. Where I might have punted on writing today’s newsletter, and not actually getting it done, I instead thought about it through this lens too. That really left me with little choice than to buck up and write before I went and did anything else. Like it should be.
That means I hit my goal so far for December: to write a post/newsletter every weekday.
Have a great weekend. Talk to you on Monday.