Building habits is harder than I’d like. I was aiming for 500 words a day — not a lot. I wasn’t even worried about really hitting 500 as long as I was writing every day.
I did three days in a row then got derailed. Back on, and off. On, and off. And then I had a bad day at work that put me in a sour mood and sent me into a social media endless loop. For days.
Honestly, it’s not like I get up in the morning and think “When I get home, I am definitely spending 5 hours on Facebook/PackRat/Tumblr/Twitter/Pinterest….” and yet even if I close all the windows except what I am working on, I find my muscle memory typing in the addresses. I presume this is what smoking is like — both habit and addiction rolled into one convenient package.
I’ve thought that maybe I need to focus on writing earlier in the day — but starting my job at 8 means I have to leave the house at 7:10 and get up at 6:15. I really can’t imagine getting up any earlier than that. Of course I *could* do that on weekends and days off… but… sigh. I am a creature of habit and I am not a morning person.
Which brings me back to breaking old habits and building new ones. I have a calendar in my “work corner” and I have been trying to keep track on there of a rough word count and what I was writing toward — I have this blog, Views of Victoria, Life as a Human and Those DeWolfes Creative as a minimum that require content contributions. I was doing OK at marking down 500/TDC or 1600/VoV (that was a 2 day total) but, like I say, I got derailed.
Maybe if I gamify it… I mean, I’ve done that with my reading — eager to read so that I regularly update my progress on GoodReads. Is there something like that to track writing? It was the one part of NaNoWriMo that worked for me — adding my word-count and watching those bar-graphs move. Of course that’s the purpose the calendar was supposed to serve.
So I am counting this post as getting back on the tracks again (even if it isn’t quite 500 words) and start marking that calendar without breaking the chain. And I will try not to be so hard on myself if I get derailed again, just keep trying to reduce the length of time I spend off the tracks.
I don’t need reminders, I just need to build the habits. I need to replace the muscle memories that suck me into that unproductive loop with regular, dedicated time writing. It takes 30 days to build a new habit. 30 uninterrupted days.
I can do this.
You most certainly can. I still write in my head. It just never sees the light of the blog. I definitely understand the discipline of writing every day, for the serious writer. There is something to writing when the spirit moves you too. Those darn jobs do get in the way.