I was reminded of a great post recently about the value of daily practice. And earlier this year, this blog was perfect evidence of how a daily routine can keep itself running.
Some days, I’d be happy with the post I published to the world. Other days, it felt a little rough. Like it could have done with just a bit more polish. So I’d tell myself – I’ll give this another day of polish and see where it lands. But then one day turned into three, and soon enough, I had a post that had lost a lot of the shape of the original idea, and frankly didn’t feel relevant enough to publish any longer.
I’ve learned the longer an article stays in a draft form, the less likely I am to ever publish it. Today, I have at least five drafts in various states of completion, but it’s been so long since I originally conceived them that they hardly feel worth salvaging at this point.
This is the problem with a non-daily writing habit. If you spend too much time away from the work, it loses some of the magic it once held – like a banana that’s spent a little too long on the shelf.
Ideas should be capitalized on while they’re still ripe.
For most of the time I was regularly posting, I had developed a routine: 1. Write a first draft of a new article. 2. Revise and publish a previous day’s draft. Basically, this allowed for one revision cycle, which helped me catch most of the glaring issues, while still keeping the momentum up. But as I discovered, some amount of a working backlog is needed beyond that. Sometimes I need more than a day to step away from an article before it’s ready for a final pass. I think the sweet spot for a backlog size is around three articles. Enough to float an off-day or two without losing track.
As I look back on this process – I realize I’ve been out of the daily posting habit for awhile, and now feels like a good time to dive back in again.