On Writing for Casual Kitchen, Part 2: Keeping Track

This is an off-topic post discussing my approach to writing for Casual Kitchen. If you haven't already, please take a look at Part 1.
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The 30 Minute Method:
1) Set a goal of spending a minimum of 30 minutes each day writing content.
2) Keep track of the days you meet and miss this goal.

Last week we went over Part 1 of The 30 Minute Method. Today, we move on to Part 2: Keeping Track.

I'll admit up front that suggesting that you keep track of the days you write and don't write might seem a bit condescending, perhaps even insulting. Please don't take it that way. This part of the process is really about keeping track of your performance and conditioning yourself to observe that performance without negative judgment.

This is what really holds The 30 Minute Method together. Let me explain.

What Gets Measured Gets Done
There's a great expression from the business world that applies perfectly here: what gets measured gets done. The corollary to this expression is: if you aren't measuring, then you can't know if you are improving.

Are you writing more consistently this month compared to last month? How about this year compared to last year? Do the habits and patterns in your daily life lend themselves to you building a consistent writing habit, or do you need to make some changes in order to reach this goal?

Understand that you can't possibly know the answer to any of these questions unless you keep track of the days you write.

Eprintable.com Calendars
How should you keep track? Fortunately, this is the easy part. Print out a one-page, full-year calendar (you can get a free one at eprintable.com) and keep it next to your computer. I put an X in that day's box on the days where I meet or exceed the 30 minute minimum. If I miss a day, I'll leave that day blank on the calendar.

Once again, let me reiterate: Do this as best you can without negative self-judgment. Your goal is not to berate yourself for missing a few days here and there. Your goal is simply to track the data series so you can observe the consistency of your writing.

Now, let's talk about the benefits of this process.

Scooby Snacks and Streaks
I'd love to go on and on about how satisfied you should be with the simple ritual of marking an X in a box at the end of your daily writing session. If putting a lousy X in a box--the psychological equivalent of a Scooby snack--is all it takes to motivate you, you are truly lucky.

But what is highly motivating is getting a long streak of X's going--not only is it satisfying to look back on all the steady effort, but after six or seven days of X's, you simply aren't going to want to break that streak. For example, I finished the entire month of May with only three blank days, and recently I had a streak of going 30 days without a blank day. You had better believe I'm not going to miss the 31st day.

Let me summarize: This process is all about consistent effort and dispassionate measurement of that effort. Those two factors are crucial inputs that drive your writing output. The 30 Minute Method is simply a basic measurement and documentation tool to help you build that habit of consistency--without negative self-judgment.

Give The 30 Minute Method a try for a few weeks and you might surprise yourself with significant increases in your writing output.

Final Thoughts
Let me leave you with a few final words of encouragement. It's not easy getting up the energy, the inspiration and the motivation to write. And this can be especially true if you're just starting out in your blogging efforts--it's easy to feel like nobody reads you, and nothing you write matters.

If you start thinking about this too much, it becomes easy for procrastination, emotional baggage, or plain old discouragement to drag you down. So, I'll say it again: don't think so much. Instead, concentrate on discipline and do your best to develop habits like The 30 Minute Method that will help you write consistently. You'll get there.

And those of you out there who have considered starting a blog, or have an urge to try your hand at writing, do it! What have you got to lose? I cannot say enough about how much I've learned, and how satisfying it has been, to create this little corner of the blogosphere with my own hands. You can do the same.

Related Links:
There are lots of blogs out there geared toward helping you write. Here are a few sources of advice and information that I've found particularly helpful:
1) Copyblogger: Particularly useful for making your writing more attention-grabbing. See for example the series on writing headlines.
2) Write to Done: A blog by the founder of Zen Habits. Great advice on many areas of writing and blogging.
3) The Simple Dollar has a great series on how to build a better blog.
4) A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech is one of the more highly-regarded books on how to maximize your creativity.

Related Posts:
On Writing for Casual Kitchen

On Writing for Casual Kitchen

This is an off-topic post on writing.

I've received a few inquires recently about my approach to writing Casual Kitchen, so I thought I’d dedicate two posts on this subject. These posts will be geared for the new or part-time blogger interested in increasing his or her writing output, as well as for those readers interested in starting a new blog or other writing project.

I'll start by sharing a preposterously simple method which has boosted my confidence, cured me (mostly) of procrastination, and helped me build a habit of consistent, regular writing. I call it The 30 Minute Method. It has two parts:

1) Set a goal of spending a minimum of 30 minutes each day writing content.
2) Keep careful track of the days you meet and miss this goal.

That's it. Seriously. Employing these two simple habits has done more to increase the consistency and quality of my writing than anything else I've done.

Let's go over why this approach works. We'll cover Part 1 of The 30 Minute Method today and we'll cover Part 2 in a later post.

No Baggage
Do you often find writing to be discouraging, even confidence-shredding? I certainly do. What if what I write sucks? What if nobody likes it? What if I don't get any validation of myself as a person after my writing session today? And so on. It's enough to keep me surfing the web and reading other peoples' blogs all day long and never write anything of my own.

The 30 Minute Method simply eliminates this baggage. It's just not that big a deal to write for 30 minutes. So set the darn timer and sit down and get to work. If you make the process more habitual and don't think about it so much, you'll get rid of most of the psychological dead weight that can hold you back.

Pre-empting Procrastination
The writer's other demon is procrastination. It's so easy to turn the TV on for a few minutes, putter around the kitchen for a few more minutes, surf the web for a few more minutes, and before you know it, you've beguiled away your entire day's ration of writing time.

Once again, here's where daily application of The 30 Minute Method reduces the psychological stakes and ensures that at least some writing gets done every day.

Less Than Crap
Just in case you think that the 30 Minute Method causes me to deliver high quality content every time I sit down, I've got news for you: the volume and quality of my writing varies wildly and arbitrarily. Sure, some days I'll write decent stuff. But many days I'll write utter steaming crap. Heck, some days I'll start off writing crap and then have a phase of non-crap writing, followed by more crap.

But here's my point: if you don’t write at all, you know you’re going to create something that’s even less than crap. And before you know it, another year will go by and you still won't have fleshed out your new blog or your new novel--or whatever ambitious writing goals you hoped to accomplish.

What this means is two-thirds of the writing battle is just sitting down, getting your mind to shut up for a few minutes, and making a habit of writing consistently.

Getting into a Flow State
I'll conclude with the most powerful benefit of The 30 Minute Method: it gives you a regular opportunity to enter a creative state where you lose all sense of time and you become totally absorbed into the task at hand.

The term widely used for this mental state is "flow." Usually it takes 15-20 minutes of focused effort to enter a flow state, so a daily 30 minute minimum writing session will give you more than enough time to get there.

When you're writing in a state of flow, your output and creativity will be much higher than typical. And you'll be so deeply engrossed in your work that not only will you tune out distractions, you'll also tune out negative self-judgment. I've found that my productivity in this state is so far above my average productivity that the output from one flow session often exceeds the combined output of several other writing sessions. And these sessions are so satisfying that I'm always happy to trade five or six--or even ten--frustrating writing sessions for just one where I experience flow.

(An aside: this is another useful application of The 80/20 Rule. If you can maximize the number of "critical few" flow sessions you have, you should be able to massively increase the quality and quantity of your writing.)

If you're interested in learning more about this subject, I strongly recommend Flow by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. It's an exceptional (albeit densely written) book that's well worth reading. In addition, there are several useful posts over on Lifehacker that discuss the flow state in varying degrees of detail.

One final note on flow: Much like how the quality of my writing varies arbitrarily, the times when I enter a flow state can likewise be random and arbitrary. This may happen to you too. But when you do enter the flow state, you might not even hear the timer go off when your 30 minutes are up! Thus you might want to to think about scheduling your 30 minute writing sessions at a time when you can run a bit overtime. In order to take maximum advantage of a good flow state, you may want to be able to stretch your 30 minute session out to an hour, at times even longer. Being in a flow state can be wonderful, but it probably shouldn't be at the expense of being late for work, or inadvertently leaving your kid waiting for you to pick him up from a baseball game.

So stop thinking, set the darn timer, and just sit down and write. Every day. It's only for a measly 30 minutes. And every so often, one of those low-pressure, no baggage, 30-minute sessions will turn into a flow session, and you'll spend an hour or more blasting out ideas and articles and copy without any mind to the world around you.

Tune in a few days from now for Part 2, where I'll cover the second part of my preposterously simple approach to writing--Keeping Track.

Related Posts:
On Writing for Casual Kitchen Part 2: Keeping Track
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
FAQs of Casual Kitchen

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