Day 1 of Writing Every Day In March

Yesterday I wrote about 500 words. I did it in fits and spurts, but had one pretty good session on my commute home. 500 words isn't a lot, but I'm totally happy with it. I'm done feeling bad about writing less than a certain number of words on a day that I planned to write, because now I plan to write every day.

Easily Attainable Goals

I heard this guy, on a podcast or somewhere, who studied will power came up with an interesting plan for getting in shape. He took something that he was already in the habit of, brushing his teeth, and used that to spark a new habit of doing push-ups. He was smart about it though and tricked himself in a cool way. He knew that if he set out to do like 50 push-ups that he would probably fail or not even start the first one. So he had the easily attainable goal of doing just five push-ups every time he brushed his teeth. He found that he would always do the push-ups because he knew he could do five, but also that once he got to five he would just keep going. So he would end up doing way more than five push-ups, but if his goal had been more he might not have started. Pretty powerful stuff that really worked.

It seems like with anything in life just getting started is the hardest thing. So I've always wanted to be a writer who writes every day, but it just seemed impossible. I could never find the time. That's why at first I was trying to have a goal of writing just 250 words every day. It seemed pretty attainable to me. I still couldn't keep it up consistently, though. Now my goal is just to write every day. It's OK if I can only write for three minutes and get 150 words down. At least I wrote that day. I have found that the times where I have started to write with the knowledge that it might only be for a few minutes it ends up being a writing session where I get a lot more words down that I thought I would. So I am very proud of my 500 words that I wrote yesterday. I plan to write more than that today, but my goal is just to write today. I've heard that it's really good to have a word count you try to reach every day and I'm hoping I get there someday, but for now I'm just committing to writing every day.

I'd love to hear how you're doing in the comments. Thanks for stopping by!