How I went from publishing once a year to once a week and finally built a daily posting habit

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Writing has always been part of my professional life.

I am not new to writing.

Besides my blogging adventures, I worked at Automattic for the past 11 years. Automattic is a fully distributed company with a deeply ingrained love for transparency and a communication culture. Over these 11 years, I published more than 15,000 posts and comments on our internal sites, as well as about 250,000 slack messages. That’s about 4 million words.

For reference, Lord of the Rings counts about 578,000 words.

I decided to make writing also part of my personal life.

Two years ago, the world changed.

The pandemic, local lockdowns, and travel limitations have made it harder and harder to see other people in person. As a result, the tools of everyday life have become more and more similar to the ones we use for work. None of my friends or family had heard of Zoom before 2020, and now it has become a common verb.

Writing has become more critical than ever in all contexts.

The secret to succeeding: Community+Consistency

I decided to dedicate myself seriously to learning in public.

I took two cohort-based courses, Write of Passage, and Ship30 for 30. I learned many things from those teachers, but the two most important lessons were not techniques or recipes; they were revelations:

• Community gives strength, courage, and feedback. It has become a crucial part of my process. Not being alone has helped me keep going on days I felt less like writing. It has shown me it was ok to open up. It has provided me with great feedback to improve my writing.
• Consistency is a secret in broad daylight. In writing like anything else, showing up every day and doing the work relentlessly, gathering feedback, improving, and repeating is a system that can’t fail and yet is so hard to implement alone.