Reply To: What is the biggest hurdle you have to overcome when it comes to writing?

[philipspace]

My biggest challenge is setting consistent times to do things, and then sticking to that schedule. I’m finding that if I do things at the same times each day, it becomes a lot easier to repeat that process, but once that schedule becomes interrupted I find it difficult to re-incorporate that habit. Life is already chaotic enough.

I started reading a book called “Atomic Habits” by James Clear that basically discusses the process of giving yourself little rewards for things you wish to do regularly. Very process oriented, less goal oriented. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” (which I have just learned is a variation of Archilochus <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.<b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>” Thanks Google!).

Anyhow, the idea is to reinforce the dopamine association with certain activities so that you crave doing them regularly, which we already do to some extent with our creative actions, eg. drawing, writing, whatever.

Incremental improvements are the goal; if you can write for five minutes today, shoot for six minutes tomorrow. Repeat. Reward yourself somehow, maybe 15 minutes on a video game, or youtube, or whatever your thing is (give yourself parameters). A 1% improvement today over yesterday is still an improvement. The upshot is that the sky’s the limit as to how far you can go.

[philipspace]

My biggest challenge is setting consistent times to do things, and then sticking to that schedule. I’m finding that if I do things at the same times each day, it becomes a lot easier to repeat that process, but once that schedule becomes interrupted I find it difficult to re-incorporate that habit. Life is already chaotic enough.

I started reading a book called “Atomic Habits” by James Clear that basically discusses the process of giving yourself little rewards for things you wish to do regularly. Very process oriented, less goal oriented. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” (which I have just learned is a variation of Archilochus <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.<b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>” Thanks Google!).

Anyhow, the idea is to reinforce the dopamine association with certain activities so that you crave doing them regularly, which we already do to some extent with our creative actions, eg. drawing, writing, whatever.

Incremental improvements are the goal; if you can write for five minutes today, shoot for six minutes tomorrow. Repeat. Reward yourself somehow, maybe 15 minutes on a video game, or youtube, or whatever your thing is (give yourself parameters). A 1% improvement today over yesterday is still an improvement. The upshot is that the sky’s the limit as to how far you can go.