For a very long time I was a perfectionist, obsessed with doing things the Right Way. Whenever I would undertake some new task, I would frontload all my work with research. How do smarter people do this? What is the generally-agreed-upon best practice for this sort of thing? How do I make sure in some mythical future state of this project, I won’t hate my Present Day Self for laying shoddy groundwork?
In a professional context, this is not really a bad way to approach things. I’ve saved myself a lot of headaches by learning from really smart people and doing lots of long, hard Thinking before I set about big projects.
One thing that took me too long to learn, though, is that this is a wonderful way to kill hobbies.
The Tyranny of the Right Way
I have a graveyard of drafts for stories, novels, and blog posts. Some of them are impeccably outlined and structured; most are pretty much empty, forsaken for the absurdly long notepad where all the “research” went. All lie dead, unposted, unpublished.
Sometimes I would fizzle out and lose motivation halfway through. Other times, I would make good progress, then stop and think, “Does this really need to be said? Am I the right person to say this? Is it worth writing at all?” Usually, the answer to one of those questions would be a resounding No, and I’d move on.
Most of the time, however, I got lost in trying to perfect what I was doing. Outlining, structuring, plotting and planning. There would be times I’d sit at my screen for tens of minutes, trying to think of the right word when Good Enough would have done.
That’s the thing with writing. You read it often enough, but sometimes it takes multiple failures and years of writer’s block before you can actually internalize it.
It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done.
Let it be shit. Let it flow, use placeholders, skip sentences or sections or entire chapters. Whatever it takes to keep writing.
Once I managed to keep this mindset front and center, I was able to really get stuff done. I went from two whole years of minimal writing to… checking notes… 66,599 words written so far this year. Sure it’s not a ton compared to others, but I’m running laps around my Last Year’s Self.1
That brings up another issue I struggled with…
The Tyranny of Statistics
A chart showing my writing progress for the year.
For six years now, I’ve kept track of how many words I’ve written every single day. Each entry is assigned a project, which is the novel, story, or other thing (like a blog) I wrote for. Each entry also has a target word count, which I typically set at the beginning of the year or project, which I aim to hit each time I write. For some years, I even kept notes on reasons behind long gaps, but I long ago dropped this practice.
This was inspired by something I read about someone who kept a desktop calendar and crossed out each day he worked on his big thing. It was his major motivation: he didn’t want to lose that streak. I thought, “Wow, that’s a great idea! I’m doing that right now.”
But I didn’t think it entirely through. Like any big lifestyle change — diet, exercise, a new sleep schedule — I didn’t realize that jumping right in would inevitably lead to failure. It’s all about increments. Instantly, I’d internalized that if Line Go Up means Success, then a missed day was an automatic Failure. And that was more demotivating than the motivation I got from Line Go Up.
This semi-unhealthy obsession with metrics eventually invaded a lot of other parts of my life. From tracking the movies I watched to the music I listened to, to all sorts of other things, I wasted so much time and effort in an attempt to quantify my life without thinking about the reasons why. But that’s another blog post.
It took burnout to give up really caring about Line Go Up. In between starting this and burning out, I even wrote not one, not two, but three different applications using three different tech stacks in order to do this “novel project management.” Talk about procrastination.
I ended up wanting to see more and more words written without caring about the quality of the words. Until I missed too many days in a row and just quit. I attributed my lack of motivation to a lot of things, but this obsession with metrics was one of the larger factors.
Eventually I came back to it. I started writing again, and yes, I still tracked my word count. My reasoning is different now, though: I just think it’s neat. If I miss a day, it’s no big deal. If I miss my target, whatever. There’s always tomorrow. And a lot of my writing doesn’t go in the spreadsheet.
What matters more than words written is forward momentum. I can sit an stare at my screen without moving for an hour and make progress.2 After all, you need to know where to go before you can plan how to get there.
This Blog
That all brings it back to the blog. This site has laid fallow for years, untouched and filled with drafts. As a professional procrastinator, I’ve spent time instead swapping between various CMSs, static site generators, themes, etc., while only actually publishing a rare post as an afterthought.
I’m not going back to edit or review the draft graveyard; they’re dead and gone. RIP. But I do aim to start posting more. Posts may be semi-unstructured, a little ranty, maybe short or long. I won’t hold myself to any set schedule, post count, or word count. Posts will come when they, or I, please.
For too long I’ve let my head get all stuffy with thoughts or ideas and never released that pressure in the form of writing. That’s what this place will be for.