Today, February 24th, 2021, marks the 300th day in a row that I wrote as a daily habit. Even though it's not one full year yet, this number feels like a huge milestone for any daily habit. I don't think I've done anything consistently like this before, and I must say that it feels great!
(using Notion as my Daily Journal entries since May of 2020)
Last year, a couple of months into the pandemic, I decided to be a bit more serious about my daily habits and created a whole system around the things I wanted to do more. One of those things was writing, as you can imagine by the title of this post.
I've never considered myself a good writer, maybe because I never had any proper training in writing, but it's been something that I've gotten more comfortable doing and started enjoying more over the past decade or so, first in Portuguese, and now mostly in English. In the beginning, I used to blog a lot about the movies I was watching, in the form of critics/reviews, which is something I've been wanting to get back to it for a while now. More recently, my writing has shifted into sharing some of my photographic experiences here on this website, combined with a newsletter I used to have with updates on my career, and more recently, I started writing "Shuffle Sundays", my weekly newsletter with curated content. One of the reasons I've been keeping up with shipping the newsletter week after week is directly related to having built this daily writing habit over the past 300 days.
My journey began with writing "morning pages", a concept explored by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. She recommends people to pick up a notebook and write 10 pages every single day, without worrying about the content. Simply writing whatever comes to mind. I did that for a little while, but even though I was enjoying the experience of slowing down and use an actual pen and paper, I noticed that that wasn't really part of my routine, so I decided to explore other ways of bringing the habit closer to my lifestyle.
Then I read the book Tiny Habits, by BJ Fogg, and found the piece I was missing on my puzzle, which was to think about ways to make the habit more interesting and appealing to get done day after day, and also coming up with an amount that was easy enough to keep up with while making sure it was still going to give me a sense of accomplishment.
For me that translated into using a journaling template I created in my Notion system, establishing that every morning I would open up the designated daily page (previously created), put a timer on for 5 minutes, and simply start writing anything that was on my mind. It automatically turned into a mix of journaling prompts (How are you feeling today?) with descriptions of what I was up to in terms of tasks and events. The key things here are knowing exactly the tools I am going to be using, and having a north start regarding what am I writing about, in case I don't feel "inspired" to write that specific day.
(a page of my Journal template, in Notion)
When I decided to start this, my main goal (if I can call it that) was simply to get more comfortable with writing as an everyday activity, with the hopes that whenever I wanted to work on a piece of content, I wasn't going to struggle so much with starting. And I'm happy to say that that was exactly what started to happen! Nowadays, when I sit down to work on a piece of content, like this one, of a new issue of my newsletter, I'm not scared to look at the empty document in front of me anymore, as I know that all I have to do is to just start writing whatever is on my mind and the ideas will start to flow naturally.