Goodhart's law strikes again! Once there's a pressure to write every day, its usefulness as an indicator is over.
I mean without doing the experiment it's hard to know if writing every day is causal or not. It seems totally plausible that it's a habit one has to build that becomes easier over time, and a person who builds that habit ends up having more shots on goal and so ends up writing more good stuff and building and audience, which builds the self-sustaining loop.
Thank you for sharing this! I've been considering doing this exact challenge and it helped me have a better sense of the pros and cons.
It's important for people to share the successes and the failures of this sort of challenge, and of course, people disproportionately write about when it works than when it doesn't.
Don't forget this other bit of writing advice: you have to write a million words to know what you're doing.
You're now a bit closer to the mark, and a bit closer to knowing what you're doing. Maybe you decide it's not worth the effort, but it's normal for most people to have to write a lot of words before they start to feel like they can write (1mm words is about 914 words a day for 3 years).
I'm sorry this was your experience.
If you hate writing, that says more about your writing potential more than the current quality of your writing. Setting the feedback loop in motion matters more than where it starts from.
This might be a time to think about why you wanted to write in the first place. At Inkhaven, Daystar gave us a hierarchy of reasons why someone writes:
A -- I want to write.
B -- I want X to be written.
C -- I want to be a writer.
D -- I want others to see me as a writer.
Which one were/are you?
Don't be sorry. While I didn't like it, it was worth it; no question about that. In the intro post on the 1st, I wrote:
The main goal is just to write more, and to lower my bar on what's writing- and publishing-worthy.
That was achieved. I ought to feel proud of myself, but right now I just feel numb.
My motivation was in a way a mix of all four categories, the division between them quite unclear. I don't think it was so much about writing, though, and more about expressing ideas. I want to be the kind of person who is known for having the kind of ideas I do have. And on the object level, I want those ideas to be known and discussed about. Writing is just the form in which ideas are supposed to be communicated, when aiming for clarity. That mostly covers B and D. The blog was also a good conversation-starter, too, and allowed me for a moment to define myself to others as a blogger instead of a tech worker. There's certainly some self-image (C) aspects to this too, but it's less prominent.
But especially in the beginning I also wanted to try writing to know whether I wanted it. I'm quite prone to expecting every new thing to feel awful, so trying things regardless is necessary. Eighty or so hours is not that steep of a price to pay for figuring that out. I rarely stick on things for such a long time, and when halfway through I was feeling that this makes no sense, I recognized that I was about to give up because it was hard, not because I disliked it.
I would gladly exchange my current work for writing texts like these, if I didn't think money and issue and there was some external motivator making me do it. But currently quitting my job to write seems unwise; I'd just spent the freed up time on some form of mindless time wasting instead. I was hoping to change that view of myself by doing this, but alas. Truthseeking doesn't cure depression; the cause and effect are intertwined.
It's done. I made it to the end. A Finnish proverb fits the situation perfectly:
Which translates to something like "A crappy journey but in any case it's over now". I forced myself to do this. It was not fun. I rarely enjoyed writing. Every day I kept looking at the word counter, hoping that it would be over already. Sometimes the text was not done when I reached 500 words, which meant I had to write more.
I did not manage to keep any buffer. Each text was written on the day when it needed to be ready, except for this one which I wrote five days in advance because why not. Sometimes I had fragments or notes ready, but most of the time not even that. Once or twice I wrote two posts back to back around midnight, but most of the time I finished a text and then did something else for the rest of the day. Doing it again tomorrow was bad enough.
I managed to not neglect my work too badly. Sure, I skipped a day or two because I had to write instead, but it's not like I don't do that to play videogames every now and then, something I completely avoided this month.
The thing I did neglect was the quality of text I produced. One could imagine that if the top priority for every day is producing a blog post, you could actually put some effort into it. I managed to put in a lot of hours, but I'm not happy about the level of effort spent. Hard to distinguish between quality and effort though, but most of the time I was tired and just wanted it to be over and picked the first topic that I could manage to find 500 words in. I did barely any editing except for spellcheck with ChatGPT. I didn't even read most of the texts myself.
Scott Alexander's quote from the Inkhaven site was something that motivated me to do this in the first place:
Goodhart's law strikes again! Once there's a pressure to write every day, its usefulness as an indicator is over. There's a more fitting quote from Scott, in The Parable Of The Talents
So yeah. I guess I just have to be happy that at least one of my cycles was around something so financially useful as programming. Imagine trying to make a living or even waste all this time I have with my other interests; online chess and reading young adult fantasy books. Weirdly enough I didn't need any of that external feedback for programming either, perhaps there was no cycle at all other than my own fascination of what could be done with the closest thing to magic we have.
That said I'm still sad that I'll never be a blogger. But as the saying goes, everyone wants to be a writer, yet nobody wants to write. I certainly don't, I'm done. Or maybe I am a blogger now, given that I've written some 20 000 words over the past month?