If Laozi were around today, maybe Taoism would include a meditation about a journal of a thousand articles beginning with a single post. As a blogger, I’ve lost my way in recent years, moving from long strings of publishing every day to struggling to contribute to the blogs I help author. That behavior ends today.
One thousand days from today is October 17, 2013. I intend to contribute new blog content to this site every day until that date. If that doesn’t tone my writing skills, nothing will.
Why aim so big? Why not start with blogging every day this month or this week? Aside from the symbolic value that comes with four digits, I also needed something drastic enough that it wouldn’t be a temptation to go off the wagon and try again later. This is a two-and-a-half-year proposition, and I want a mindset that shifts on that scale.
It isn’t a lack of material that has kept me from blogging. I battle my open-tab fetish by dragging interesting but unread pages into a desktop folder, which has grown to 359 items over the past year. I’ve re-integrated Snackr, a great ambient RSS reader, to join Twitter’s new Mac App. The two quiet but steady streams bring me new catalysts for writing. I also have over 2600 academic papers and PDFs in various stages of being processed, some of which are directly relevant to my current dissertation topic.
There are a number of possible factors keeping me inactive. Part of this personal pledge to write it to better identify and understand those barriers, and to learn to adjust.
2 replies on “The Journal of 1000 Posts”
Maybe it isn’t so much that you are inactive, but that you are simply over-stimulated. I have suffered from this particular lack of focus over the past 40-odd years, starting way too many projects and therefore never being able to sit down and finish most of them (however genius they may be). In fact, the many blogs I have started over the years have only ever languished after initially impassioned stumbles. And most projects have been abandoned unless there is an accountability factor OUTSIDE of myself. Being paid, for instance, is a good motivator. Having a fixed schedule with which I am beholden to someone ELSE is a good one. Setting my own deadlines and milestones rarely holds up—but I wish you the absolute best with this project! Stick with it and you’re my hero. Okay, you can be my hero anyway, but only if you make the tights purple instead of blue.
Writing has always been a bit different for me. Until 2008, I had a long string of almost daily writing, and part of what made that work was that it became a deep part of my process of getting through each day. Writing that book took a lot out of me, I think, but it’s mostly the long break in the short-form writing that proved difficult to pick up again.
I need it to work through my dissertation, which coincidentally started getting derailed about the time I stopped writing regularly.