Habits

16-09-2017

I've spoken before about how when I am writing I like to get into the habit of doing it daily. The five hundred words a day, minimum, limit to hit or one full page, again at the minimum, edited so that little by little the book gets done.

It all sounds pretty easy to do and most of the time it is, but there is one thing about Life that not everyone factors in.

Life is a bastard that likes to get in the way of you doing things by making you busy. All the time.

I follow a few writers and content creators online and one of them had an interesting answer to the question "How do you keep focused on creating content when you have a hectic work schedule?".

The person being asked the question is a gamer at heart and figured that forming the creating habit was not enough for him, but that his mind might be wired in such a way that there was another approach he could take. Incorporating a gaming aspect into his daily content creating habit.

He went off a got an app on his phone that basically alerts him each day at a set time and asks if he has hit his daily content creation target. Tapping on the positive button increases his habit score and gets fed into this little graph within the application that, over time, can be used to see when he hits his target and on what days he actually has to be pinged first to create something.

It sounded like a gimmick if I am being honest. But I'm a gamer at heart as well and figured I might just go ahead and try it out. The first week didn't really do anything for me as I was hitting the target with ease. But as the score crept into double digits I started to get an 'itch' in the back of my mind. My alert fires at ten p.m. every day. The closer I got to that time without doing my writing task the worse the itch got. After a month of using the application I was able to see that at the weekends I am particularly productive because I can get the writing done during the afternoon, typically, but during the week my sweet spot is Tuesday to Thursday.

As a stats junkie it is interesting. But the gamer in me is now worried. My score is currently 113. That's 113 consecutive days working on 'Stolen Stories' without fail.

Failure is not an option, but it is a possibility. Some day Life is going to get all its ducks in a row and sweep the legs right out from under me.

Bringing me right back to 0.

But for now the game is afoot and I'm going to keep using that score to drive me forward. I'm genuinely intrigued to see what my score will be once I am completely finished with 'Stolen Stories'.

Moreso because then the question will be do I let the score reset while I move onto the next project (something a little different, but more on that closer to the time) or do I continue with the same one...

Blue_jester