048: Making Writing a Habit
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Making writing a habit
Hi, friends, I hope you're having an amazing week. This week's episode is not going to be for everyone. So I want to just put a little disclaimer upfront before we dive into this idea of a habit. Because here's the truth, you do not have to write every day to be successful as a writer, you don't have to write every day to meet your goals. It's just not necessary. And anyone who tells you that only real writers, you know that you you're only a real writer, if you write at the same time every day, write for two hours and get up at 5am. It's just bullshit. It's not true. That being said, this episode is for you. If you want to get a little bit more consistent with your writing, if you want to start building a habit, whatever that looks like, whether that is every day, every other day, a certain day of the week, whatever that looks like, whatever the habit is, if you want to start developing that this is the episode for you. So if this doesn't sound like it's something that's up your alley, if you you know, don't if you think that this is going to put pressure on you totally fine. You can just get this week's episode and I'll see you next week.
But if this is something that you're interested in diving into, that we're going to talk about, and the idea for this episode came, Well, it was inspired by two places really. I've been having a lot of conversations with my one on one coaching clients about this and then also in the Blank Page To Book membership. A few people have really, you know, been kind of struggling with this and ask questions about this. They members in the membership, get a monthly private q&a podcast where they can submit questions ahead of time. And then I record a podcast episode that answers all the questions. And several people submitted questions about writing habit and finding time and getting consistent with it. So I figured this would be a good topic to dive into. And I'm going to share a few things that I have learned from this book, atomic habits by James Clear. This is a book that I saw everyone and their mothers sharing on social media. Well, that's not true. It wasn't everyone and their mother, it was everyone and their mother in like certain niches, certain circles, like the online business world, people who are really into productivity and hustle and hacking their I don't know, it just seemed like a certain type of person who is really into this book, which honestly made me not want to read it because I think strategic hustle is best not just hustling for the sake of hustling. But so i But I decided you know what the hell finally pick it up. And I'm only I'm not quite well, actually, I'm about three quarters of the way through right now. And there are some interesting things that I'm going to share with you. And I'll link the book in the description of the episode. So you can check it out and get a copy if you'd like.
Again, I don't think everything in this book is super helpful. The way that it's phrased is very like bro II, and I don't know, but there are things that I think can be useful and helpful. So yeah, and what's interesting about it is I was reading a lot of the things that he suggests and the things he talks about in this. And I realized that I've already been doing them are already talking to clients about these kinds of things. But he just puts a language to it, he puts a different, you know, kind of Yeah, a different language to it. So it's kind of interesting to see how he describes these different concepts. So again, this is the episode for you, if you're if you are wanting to be a little bit more consistent with your writing, and really start making it a habit, something that you do frequently.
So let's get into it. Let's let's dive in. So the first tip is something that comes from atomic habits, and it's the idea of a two minute rule. Okay? This is something that he suggests, like when you know you have to do something, you know, you you want to do something, you have a task that's in front of you. It's very overwhelming to think about the big picture. And it's very overwhelming to set a big task for yourself. So related to writing, this might be like, Oh, I have to sit down and write three chapters or write for an hour or write 5000 words, right? That's a lot. There's a lot to ask of yourself to sit down and do if you're In flow when you're feeling inspired, and the words are coming, Awesome, that's great. But it's just, it's a lot. So what's better to do is to break it out down into super manageable chunks. And that's part of why I'm such a big believer in writing sprints is because you can just set aside a 15 minute sprint, a 10 minute sprint, a 20 minute sprint, whatever length of time you decide, and say, Okay, I'm just gonna write for these minutes that I have this timer set, and try to get as much written as I possibly can in that sprint. And that's a way to make it a little bit less overwhelming and daunting, instead of sitting down and saying, I have to write for 90 minutes or write 10,000 words or whatever it is. But the way that he talks about the two minute rule in this book is, well, it's exactly what it sounds like, when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
So we give some examples. I'll give one example from the book, and then one that's more related to writing. So instead of reading before bed each night, which is sort of an intangible sort of goal that can't really measure, it becomes read one page, and that's your habit that you're going to develop, you're going to read one page before bed each night. That will only take you a few minutes. It's the resistance just kind of lessons because it's so manageable, right? So how this could relate to writing is instead of saying, I'm going to write 5000 words, or three chapters, or even 1000 words, say, I'm going to write one paragraph. That's it every day, this week, before I sit down at my computer, or before I start my job, to sit down, sit down on my computer, and I'm gonna write a paragraph. That's it. A paragraph is manageable, right? That's, that's totally doable. Or maybe instead of two minutes, maybe it's a five minute thing.
So everyday, this week, before I start work, I'm going to set a timer for five minutes, and I'm going to write for, I'm gonna write for the five minutes, that's it, that's all you have to do. And when you are developing a habit, the idea is an implementing this roll, the idea is that you stop after those five minutes, or you stop after that paragraph. Even if you you want to keep going, at least initially, you know, over time, you're gonna build up and kind of work your way up. But you want to have a lot of proof that you can do this, that this is not a big deal. It just takes a few minutes of your day. And you feel so accomplished. You see the progress that you're making, isn't it amazing? And then you start to get your emotions involved, and it feels good. And then you're so much more likely to do it because of how you're feeling. Right? So that's, that's kind of the the idea of the two minute rule. And then maybe after, you know, a week of doing that, then the next week, you say, Okay, well maybe, why don't I change it to a page? Or why don't I change it to 10 minutes and kind of, you know, work your way up. So another thing that I thought was so helpful. Another tip I want to share with you from Tomic habits is reducing friction, essentially making it easy for you to do this habit to do this thing that you want to start doing regularly, decreasing the number of steps between you and your, your habit your that you want to be implementing.
So think of it related to again, I'll give you a non writing example and then we'll talk about it in a writing situation. So let's say you want to start going to a gym, right? If you decide that you want to go to a gym, that is 45 minutes away from your house, because it's a little bit cheaper, maybe it's 10 bucks cheaper a month, and you decide, that's the one that I'm going to do, it's 45 minutes away, I'm going to go, you know, every single morning, I'm going to wake up, start waking up at 530, I'm going to go to the gym every single day before work, go 45 minutes out of my way, come home and shower, and then I'm going to drive to the office that's you know, 20 minutes away. There's a lot, there's a lot of friction, that's going to make it difficult for you to develop that habit. Let's look at all of those pieces if you are not used to waking up at 530. If you've been waking up at 730 to suddenly shift your schedule one day and shift to 530 is going to feel like a very rude awakening that's very early.
Number two, your gym is 45 minutes away. Maybe there's a gym that's 10 minutes away from your house or five minutes away from your house, but it's a little bit more expensive. So you think well, I want to save a little bit of money. I'll go to the gyms 45 minutes away. It's a lot to ask of yourself to drive 45 minutes in the morning, when you're tired to go to the gym. It's a lot to ask of yourself to do that every single day and then not only do that, but then come home, shower, get ready for work and then drive you know, do your commute to work. There are so many places where things could go wrong, there's so many places where your brain could just be like, Nope, this is just way too much, I'm not going to do it. So there's lots of friction in that situation. Now let's look at something that's a little bit easier where you could reduce some friction. Maybe there's, again, there's a gym, that's 10 minutes or five minutes away, you know, it's a five minute detour on your way home from work. So you could put your clothes in your workout clothes in your car in the morning when you're going to work. And then after you leave the office, you're coming home already, right? You have that commute, and you go five or 10 minutes out of your way to go to the gym, stay for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, a manageable amount of time, and then come home and do your evening routine, the same exact way, there's a lot less friction in that scenario, in that situation, that's going to make it a lot more likely that you will be successful in that goal successful in that habit that you're developing. Right.
So let's think about this when it comes to writing. And let's use the 530. No, let's use the 5am writing club as an example, I I'm a morning person, but 5am is too early for me. But there's a part of me that's like secretly jealous of the 5am writing club people I would love to be up at early because I really do like mornings. But I just, I just can't, maybe we'll do an experiment sometime. And try that for a week and see how it goes. But anyways, so let's say that you decide you are going to write a book in two months, you're great, you're giving yourself 60 days to get your first draft done. So you need to wake up at 5am. And you need to write for three hours before you start work. Let's say you start work at 830, you're gonna get up at five, you're gonna give yourself three hours, and then you're gonna eat breakfast and like scrambleto get ready and then start work. And then let's also say that you have this idea that you have to have like the perfect that everything has to be lined up perfectly in order for you to write. So it can't be too hot or too cold, you have to have complete silence in the house, you have to have the perfect playlist going like all of these conditions have to be perfect in order for you to sit down and start writing.
That's a lot. There's a lot of friction there. It's not easy, you're not making it easy for yourself to do this habit. So let's think of ways we could reduce that friction, right? Let's say that you you start work at eight, and you're not really a morning person. And so the idea of getting up at 5am just feels like torture, well, okay, great, we're not going to do that, then don't don't do it, you want to make the habit easy, you want to make it appealing and attractive, right. So let's say instead of doing that, maybe you work from home. Or maybe you work in an office, I guess it doesn't really matter in this example, because what you're going to do is you're going to take 10 minutes on your lunch break. And you are going to write for 10 minutes. And you're going to write for 10 minutes right before you decide to eat your lunch. Right. So you're wrapping up work, you're about to go on your lunch break, you take 10 minutes, do a writing sprint, get as much done as you can in that 10 minutes, and then close it and go have lunch. Thank you eddy eddy is meowing. Doesn't that sound like a good idea, eddy. So in that example, it's so much easier, you're sandwiching it in between things that you're already doing, you're already at work, you're already taking a lunch break, it's a time of day when you're a little bit more mentally alert and awake as opposed to an early morning, you don't have other commitments that you have to do on your lunch break. Boom, that's, that's how that could be a lot easier for you.
Now, you could look at that example and say like, Well, my lunch break is, you know, some days it's this and some days i only have 20 minutes to eat. And then I have to rush and get two calls. Like, that's okay, you can adjust when you do this. Having a writing habit doesn't mean it's set in stone, and you absolutely have to write at 12:05 pm every single day, or else you're failing. You know, you can adjust if you need to. And maybe you're thinking oh, well, I can't write on my work computer, you know, I can't be writing opening up Microsoft Word on my work computer. Okay, so then maybe you pull up your phone and you write on your phone for 10 minutes, or you go for a walk outside of your office campus and, you know, dictate into your phone for 10 minutes. There are all sorts of ways that you could brainstorm this so that it works for you. So if I, if anything in that example is is like you're like, Oh, it doesn't apply to be, that won't work for me. That's okay. Take that as inspiration. And think about how you could make the same concept work in your life in your schedule. How can you make this easy?
How can you reduce the number of friction points along the way to make yourself a lot more likely to accomplish this? So those are two two tips from atomic habits that I think are really helpful and can apply to writing, I will also, I'm also going to give you a third tip that I have used. And again, I don't, I don't know that this is necessarily going to be helpful, helpful for everyone, because people respond differently to different types of motivation. So take this if it's helpful, if not, that's fine, too. Something that really helped me when I was writing consistently when I had a solid habit going, because I had a goal in mind, because I really wanted to finish my book in, you know, three months, what I did is I tracked my word count. So I had a Google Doc, that was open, that I opened up after my writing sprint, so I would sprint for 20 to 25 minutes, something like that. Sometimes I would just do one sprint a day. And sometimes I would do two, if I felt like I wasn't making much progress, or I just wanted to do another sprint, I would do another sprint. And then I would write down in this, this document, how many words I wrote that day, and then what my total word count was, and it was so motivating to me to see the word count increase to see the progress that I was making every day. Because let's say I wrote 800 words one day, I mean, 800 words is great, that's a fantastic, you know, amount of words. But it didn't always feel like it was really adding up too much. It was like, Well, I've still got, you know, I'm writing a 90,000 word novel, like 800 words is just a small chunk of that.
But over the course of a few days, a few weeks, I really started to see my total word count increase, and that was super motivating to me. So think about how you can kind of hack like motivation to get you to kind of do this on a regular basis, when you're building a habit. And again, everyone responds differently to different types of motivation. But for that period in my life, for what I was working on, it was so so helpful, and it was fun. And it made the process more enjoyable for me. And that's another mindset shift, right? If it's more enjoyable, you're probably going to be more likely to do it. Again, not that I mean, I say this a lot. But it's like, you don't have to, to love every single moment of writing. And it's like, not the goal to make every single moment of writing just absolute pure joy and bliss. Because you are gonna have days that are hard and you you don't want to wait and only right in those moments when you feel totally just pie with excitement and love and joy. But, you know, if there's something that you can hack or something you can implement to make the process more fun, then why not do it? So, okay, so you can check out atomic habits if you want.
Again, I think some of the information is helpful. Some of it's kind of broken, like very hustle culture. But if you are wanting to get more disciplined with your writing, this is a great way to do that to start implementing some of these tips and strategies. And it also, I was really interesting, it was really interesting for me to kind of learn a little bit more about myself and to see myself in some of these patterns that he was talking about. Also, with negative habits, it's not just, it's not just about building good habits, but it's also how to stop doing bad habits, which I found interesting as well so you can check it out if you are interested. Alright, thanks for listening see you next week.