For the past several weeks, I’ve made a concerted effort to blog every day.
When you do something daily, it becomes an ingrained habit – something you can continue to do without even thinking about it.
Showering. Brushing your teeth. Reading the newspaper. All things we do on a daily basis (or at least I hope you’re showering every day) without thinking about it.
Writing every day is something I want to be capable of without over-thinking the effort – so it’s something I force myself to do daily in the hope that it will become habitual.
Building a Habit
How long does it take to build a habit? Some say it takes three weeks of consistent effort.
The functional word here is “consistent.”
I write every day, but it’s at different times. Some days I wake a bit earlier and write before breakfast. Other days, I’ll pull up an editor during my lunch break. Yet other days will find me writing after dinner. This post, for example, was written before bed the night before it was published.
I’m writing every day, but I’m not writing consistently. To develop a real habit, I need to do more than make an effort to write every day. I need to set aside time out of my schedule designated explicitly for writing.
More than Prose
My day job is writing PHP code, again something I do every day. As a result, I’m often burned out from using a computer to type by the end of the day – one of the reasons I write often before work or late into the evening. Still, as writing code is a daily activity, it’s not something I need to think about too much to actually sit down and crush code.
I want to write regular words like I write classes and functions.
I flex my creative muscle by also reading every day – but reading is a far cry from writing. It will take work and focus to build this into a habit.
What behaviors do you want to build into habits? What more work could you do today to start?