For the last month, I have been working at writing 1,000 words per day from Monday to Saturday each week. This post provides a quick update about where I am and what needs to change.
Let’s dive in to see how things have gone. First, the bad news is that although I wrote every day, I only sometimes reached 1,000 words. Sometimes, I wrote just a few hundred. I am still happy with that accomplishment because that is far more than I have written in previous years, and the consistency has been there. But that consistency now needs to be changed into quality and purpose.
This leads me to the next challenge, which is writing with purpose. After the first ten days of writing every day, I found that I was writing to reach the goal of 1,000 words consistently. I quickly found this wasn’t valuable because the content was just about anything and everything. It lacked any focus or direction other than I had some idea of the goal.
To tackle this, I decided what I wanted to write, why, and the plan so that I could move forward with purpose. I have a blog called devfright.com, an iOS tutorial website I started about 11 years ago. It needs more content. To start building traffic and build a mailing list, I plan to write a 14-day series of tutorials that will be sent out by email each day to new subscribers. This would then lead to several books and various tutorials on my site.
Although the content isn’t fully explained above in this blog post, I now have it all mapped out, and everything I am writing for devfright.com has a purpose and order to it. There is still some work to do to get into the cadence of it, but currently, I am about halfway through the 14 days of tutorials for the email list.
Knowing what I want to write about and mapping the content helps me overcome writer’s block. I know what I need to write each day and have a good few months of ideas.
Another lesson I learned is that quality is essential. If writing 1,000 words consistently isn’t hard enough, writing quality content adds to that difficulty. But it’s essential. It isn’t easy, and I need to double down on making sure I write things worth reading. There’s no point in me writing tutorials about creating something if that something isn’t that great.
Final Thoughts
Although I have some failures, I am still pleased that I have kept up consistently from Monday to Saturday each week. Now that I feel more comfortable with having that as a daily routine and a chain that hasn’t broken yet, I am in an excellent place to improve my work.