Three-years ago today (Nov 30, 2019), I made a public commitment on this site to begin writing a daily short-notes and publish on this site everyday. At the beginning, I made this commitment for a period of only 25 days, as part of the Christian advent calendar.
At first, I was under the impression that it was hard to write daily notes. I even wrote “experimental” because I wasn’t even sure I could keep my commitment much longer. Yet, looking for other high-profile writers like Seth Godwin and others, I went to great lengths to do so. Now that this was one of my best decisions to foster a better writing habit.
Now, after 3 years, I continue to maintain my new writing habits of a short-note every day. When I am very busy dealing with other urgent matters, I have to admit that I have failed to publish daily notes from time to time. Except on one occasion when I got really sick, I made sure to write daily notes for these missing days, and posted “predated”.
After three years, my day-to-day practice of writing notes is refreshing. When I work on my other technical articles, I could write a few words about other things.
Although, my original goal for this site was to write brief notes on all matters of interest, including health and wellness, technology, Internet privacy and others. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, my notes focus solely with COVID-19 and related health issues. Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has diminished, I have begun to return to its original goal.
In the middle of June 2020, I even launched another “Just Write” site where I posted casual notes and bookmarking posts. At the moment, there are more than 400 notes, which I plan to merge in this site. I am also planning to give this website a fresh look soon, which I have been thinking about for some time.
Habit Building
My writing habits are influenced by The Power of Habit, Why we do what we do in life and business, by Charles Duhigg, the best-selling author of the New York Times. I read the book in 2014 when it was out, and it’s still on my shelves. The book also strengthened to build my other daily morning stretching activity as a habit, which until then only practiced .
One of the things I’ve learned through the process is that unless there’s a clear benefit, we’re not motivated to work hard. Developing habits is a hard job that demands persistence and perseverance. As normal human beings, we do not succeed in incorporating everything we want to do into our habits.
For me, I have tried many times to read some books per month/year. Yet, I have woefully failed to build up my book reading habit too, which is one of my greatest regrets, so far.
Links to daily-notes archives: