Everyone sometimes struggles with consistency. Do you want to develop a good habit but often fail after a few days? Well, you are not alone.
To help myself with that (and possibly you), I come up with the idea of making a public commitment and finding accountability partners.
Public commitment
This post is my public commitment to writing and publishing articles daily for the next 365 days. It's well over any magic number you hear that is necessary to form a habit. For my liking, it's fair enough.
Accountability partners
To hold myself accountable (and to make you more interested in helping me stay consistent), I declare that I'll pay $1000 to one of my accountability partners (by whom I mean anyone who comments on this post on dev.to) if I miss a day in publishing articles in the next year.
The rules
- One article a day published, no excuses.
- No article published - a script chooses a random person from the comments section to transfer money to their bank account.
- The way of choosing a random person may change with time - I want to make it automated and public, to provide transparency and fairness (and to prove I'm taking it seriously!). Feel free to propose your ideas on how to approach this problem.
Join me in the challenge
I encourage all of you who want to develop a good habit of putting yourself out there to join the challenge.
Of course, your numbers may be different. Maybe your goal is to publish just one article a week. Maybe $1000 is too much or too little to make you feel uncomfortable.
Choose your perfect numbers and join me in the challenge! If you struggle with this, DM me on Twitter, and I'll do my best to help you come up with numbers that will work for you.
And please, let me know what you think about this idea. Feedback highly appreciated!
Top comments (81)
A great challenge but before you embark could I simply suggest something.
Instead of an article a day maybe focus on writing a certain number of words a day.
Otherwise the standard of your articles is going to go down and down as time goes on.
Quality over quantity.
It is still something that is easy to be publicly addressed and monitored.
As most posts, if you are writing daily, are going to be short why not set the goals as 500 words a day.
Then once a week check the word count, if you are not at 3500 words then send the money.
It gives you flexibility to write in-depth pieces when you want to that way (you could write one 3500 word article or 7, 500 word articles).
Good point. Sure, this approach may lead to me writing longer & higher quality articles.
I'm wondering how to make the process public and transparent. Maybe I'll push drafts of my articles to a public Github repo. It's gonna be easy to track the history of my writings there :)
It isn't a bad idea, but just consider that your drafts may contain some stuff that you prefer not to go public (as you have mis phrased something just to get the idea down and it could be potentially inflammatory - it all depends very much on what you are writing about, if it is just purely about code and development you will be fine, straying into politics, religion, gender issues etc...probably best not to have a public record while you formulate thoughts and ideas and haven't had chance to check your writing cannot be misinterpreted!)
I mean, if you want a rough and ready way to do it just write on dev.to - at the end of one article point to a page for the next article (saved as draft as you then have a public URL) and then people can follow along that way.
If I were doing this challenge, I perhaps would dedicate the first few articles to building a custom blog that allows people to see when you worked on what. A fun way to have loads to write about initially and a fun way to be transparent!
There is no reason these couldn't be short posts (what framework you chose for back-end, what (if any) you chose for the front-end, libraries you explored for syntax highlighting, including a daily word count graph etc.) obviously it all depends on your experience levels and stuff as to how you frame those articles.
Anyway just a couple of ideas, I hope this goes well for you as a fellow "newbie to writing" who hasn't quite nailed down a schedule (but I am close 😋).
I am writing using roamresearch.com app. I'll not be writing about coding exclusively. I'll be writing about whatever I feel like to write about, about things I'm currently doing/learning, about things I think may be helpful to others. I don't really care about numbers - I'll be writing for myself, but at the same time with the intention to give as much value to the readers as I can.
Some of the posts may be about fetchings CPU usage metrics from Pods in Kubernetes and others about productivity tips, biohacking, philosophy or whatever. I'm pretty geeky, so the posts are going to be connected to the software industry no matter how hard I'd try to avoid it :P
Probably I'll write privately in the Roam app and publish only 'ready' drafts to the public.
I think that the smart way to do it.
I know you want to share every detail with people but at the end of the day if each week you produce 3500 words or more it doesn't matter how you got there (one sitting or several days). It requires very similar effort levels and you still have "your money where your mouth is" to keep you on track!
Bear in mind that 3500 words per week is the same as writing 2 novels (180k words!), so nobody is going to begrudge a tiny bit of "slack" in your original idea of daily writing for if you need a break, so I think weekly updates is more than enough.
Before you set your goal in stone, just bear in mind the time it takes to research subjects, that is the bit I see a lot of people forgetting!
You are completely right that research takes time. I'm currently exploring the Zettelkasten method to combine consuming content with writing. You may find this short article useful shime.sh/use-zettelkasten-to-write... or read "How to take smart notes" by S. Ahrens if you are interested in this topic.
100% True
I don't need the money but good luck! (I thought I was doing well for posting at least once a week for over 52 weeks 😅)
When holidays come around make sure you've written up a backlog of articles that you can just click
Publishand enjoy the rest of the day without stressing about losing $1000!BTW article a week for 52 weeks is a great result, congrats!
Thanks for the support and tips!
Yeah, I'm planning to build a buffer of at least 7 articles in advance so I can take a break from writing for a couple of days if needed.
Best of luck! When are you starting though?
And, that's a lot of money. Instead of money, maybe you could give listing credits (if it's possible) because some of the younger people here (like me) might not even have bank accounts.
Currently I'm on a streak of one/two posts a week since I joined DEV. Just yesterday (or something) I got the 8 week badge
The best answer to 'when are you gonna start?' is always TODAY! :P It's tempting to put it back, but I don't want to start the challenge with excuses.
Sure, $ can be substituted with listing credits, I don't mind, the 'winner' will choose.
This is such a great challenge 👍
I have just started contributing to open source, and my current streak is 28 days (almost 1 month 🎉). I'm planning to contribute daily even if it's on my own project or other open source projects.
I will be checking out your articles daily 😁🚀
If you want to play with Rust and open source, feel free to take a look there -> github.com/Qovery/RedisLess
It's a project that was started by the CEO of the startup I work on :) We started coding very recently, so it's not too complex yet to grasp and contribute!
I haven't worked with Rust yet. But still, I will check out this repo 🚀
Writing articles can be really draining, I think sometimes it might be more interesting to choose quality over quantity. In any case, I find your goal really motivating and I hope you find what you're looking for through this achievement :)
After reading this comment dev.to/inhuofficial/comment/1ebni (and a few others) I'm thinking about replacing "1 post a day" with "x words a day" to mitigate the problem of quantity > quality.
Good deal. Myself I would shoot for 1 per week. What about quality vs quantity... Sure a few posts containing a few snippets of useful code is nice to have every now and again, but a whole site of small blurbs.... Thinking of the user aspect, this of course will help with SEO.
I'm thinking about replacing "1 article a day" with "x words a day" as suggested in this comment -> dev.to/inhuofficial/comment/1ebni
Wow, that's a big challenge and stress maybe. Don't forget to set daily reminders to not forget them. I've tried to So if we want to earn these $1000, let's comment a lot to increase probability haha...
Good luck !
Thanks! Yeah, I plan to create a buffer of a few posts in advance and try to automate publishing them here, otherwise, it would be way too easy to fail.
I'm gonna get that $1000!
Thanks for the support haha :)
I support you.
(But 1000$ in my account just sounds too sweet. 😁 )
I once wrote a limerick a day for two years. It becomes quite the chore to think up things to write. Good luck to you!