Power of a public commitment

At the beginning of the year, I made a public commitment to write and publish a new article every business day.

As a consequence, this is the article #83 that I am publishing in the last four months.

Yesterday I broke my streak. I got busy with everything else and forgot to write.

But the secret to winning is not about never failing. It is about analyzing your mistakes and improving the process to make it more robust going forward.

It is also about reevaluating your commitments.

So, I’ll start with that. I do want to keep writing daily, even though sometimes that means that I don’t have as much time to read, reflect, or get other stuff done.

I also recognize that the quality of my writing is slipping a bit while the focus seemed to shift to the questions that are least in the area of my immediate control.

Since my son will be visiting with grandparents and I will have some additional bandwidth next week, I plan on working through a more disciplined approach to writing.

That may mean that I do not publish new material daily, but rather spend some days editing and revising content that was already published.

It may also mean that I work on the habit of chunking my writing to smaller topics so that I can get something out there every day.

It may also mean outlining the topics ahead of time to prepare for writing and publishing to a calendar, which will increase coherency of my writing and help me better focus on series that I really want to highlight.

Next, I want to consider some of the tools that allowed me to stay ahead of the publishing game in the past:

Going forward I want to employ the first three methods while giving myself the grace to skip a day here and there because life happens and while writing is important, there are other facets of my life that are no less important today.

My failure did not happen yesterday. Instead, the seeds of it were planted when I failed to make adjustments to my expectations and planning two months ago when I started a major full-time project that sometimes forces me to work longer hours.

Over the last two months, I burned through my backlog and failed to build one back up. And honestly, even having one or two stories in reserve makes a difference in the mindset and the writing process.

This is something that I will aim to rectify over the next week.

Finally, I want to see how this writing process fits my greater goals.

Originally, I set out to write so that I could connect with like-minded individuals, share my insights and generate content that could be repurposed later.

While I met some like-minded individuals through my writing process, unless I couple it with more extensive reading, clapping, reaching out, communicating, I would only give myself 2 out of 10 for how that’s working.

Over the next week, I will evaluate the best ways to embed relationship-building into my publishing, or possibly dropping this as a goal for the activity.

Without actively promoting, the content seems to get little interaction. Perhaps a more interesting observation is that I am gaining much better traction on personal wellness articles (even if the internet is flooded with those) than on genuinely original work in the fields of management and economics.

Perhaps it is a question of finding my audience, recognizing that I am failing to communicate or asking myself why the few people who do engage with these topics seem not to want to engage in meaningful conversations about them.

Sharing insights worked well for some things, but not for others. I seemed to have done a decent job sharing the ideas I feel an emotional connection with or some of the simple tips and tricks while failing to explain many of my more profound thoughts on management and organizational development.

I think the failure here is in trying to be comprehensive and failing to break the subjects down into bite-sized chunks. Honestly, the more theoretical topics are deep enough that they don’t lend themselves to a short daily blurb format.

This is something to think about.

With content generation, it seems more linear. But in reality, a great outline and sticking to predetermined topics is the key to success here.

I wrote a lot. And some themes do emerge.

But many of the themes that I would want to cover more deeply go untouched.

Much to think about. Much to write about.

What are some things that you would look forward to learning from my writing?

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