Category Archives: productivity

One Year of Daily Blogging: Lessons and Insights

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Today officially concludes my one-year daily blogging challenge that I committed to a little over a year ago. I started on December 24, 2019 and have published a new blog post or video every day since them. So that’s 374 days in a row if you include today’s post.

As you can verify from the blog archives, I successfully completed the challenge.

I’ve been blogging every year since I started in 2004, but this is the first year that I’ve published something new every single day. This was an interesting experience, so I’ll share some thoughts about what it was like, some of which might surprise you.

I had no doubts that I could and would cross the finish line. As I’ve noted before, these kinds of challenges are won or lost in our minds before we begin Day 1. Quitting or skipping a day wasn’t a temptation at any point. I was all-in with this from the beginning.

Partly I did this as a gift to my future self. It creates a powerful new reference experience. I now know what it’s like to publish something every day for more than a year, and for the rest of my life, I’ll always know that I’m capable of at least that much. Even 20 years from now, I’ll be able to remember that in the wild year of 2020, I published something new every single day.

I’ve created and published more new material this year than in any previous year of my life. I’ve been earning a living from my creativity since 1994, so I have a lot of years of that behind me. It seems I still have a lot of years of that ahead of me too.

A New Level of Creative Output

I would estimate that I created and published around 400,000 new words of material to my blog this year, which is about 5x the length of my book Personal Development for Smart People.

Additionally, I recorded and published the new Stature course this year. That course is more than 16 hours of audio, which would be around 160,000 words (more if you count the bonuses too). So that bumps it to about 560,000 words for the year – all published.

Beyond this I wrote hundreds of Conscious Growth Club forum posts, which are privately published in our members-only forums. And there were 36 new CGC video coaching calls with educational segments plus 4 new quarterly review calls, all published for CGC members. Then there was material recorded for outside sources like interviews, which would bump it even higher. And this doesn’t count personal journal entries – I do a lot of journaling too, easily 100Ks more of words per year.

All together if you just count the new material created and published for the benefit of my blog readers, YouTube subscribers, and CGC members this year, I’d say it’s well beyond a million words of text, audio, and video. That may seem like a lot, but a million words in a year is only about 2700 words per day.

Oh yeah… in November I also wrote 55,051 words of a new novel for NaNoWriMo (currently unpublished). I’d love to work on that more in 2021.

Suffice it to say that this was my highest year of creative output ever. It adds a substantial amount to my lifetime body of published work, which was already in the millions of words. While the courses and CGC members-only materials are copyrighted, my blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts are uncopyrighted and donated to the public domain. So everyone is free to republish, translate, or to create derivative works (including for sale) from the new articles and YouTube videos I published this year and in all years prior.

It does feel nice to make a bigger personal contribution to the collective work of humanity this year. And it gives AI more to chew on as well.

So that’s the external side. Let me share a bit about what the personal experience was like since I know some people are curious to know about that.

The Experience of Daily Blogging for a Full Year

First off, this level of output was really no sweat. It may seem like it was a discipline challenge, but it didn’t land that way for me, and I didn’t expect that it would be particularly discipline-based before I started. I figured that I’d get into a decent rhythm early in the year, and then I’d mostly stick to that rhythm throughout the year. And that’s pretty much what happened.

I knew that this could be a miserable challenge if I resisted it at any point, so I built in enough flexibility in how I framed it before I started. There was no minimum word count, so some days I only wrote 300-500 words, which might take as little as 15-20 minutes. That gave me some nice flexibility on busier days. Most days I wrote considerably more, but it was nice to have the option to write less.

I knew that one post per day was a reasonable standard that I could trust myself to honor. I wasn’t going to write a whole year of crappy trivial posts just to meet the letter of the challenge. What would have been the point in doing that?

I also committed to daily publishing but not to daily writing. This allowed me to try batch blogging by writing extra posts in a single day and queueing them to be published one day at a time. I didn’t do a lot of batching throughout the year, but I did do this a few times, writing as many as 7-8 posts in one day or recording a batch of YouTube videos. That way I could take up to a week off from daily writing to give myself a little break here and there. For the vast majority of posts, however, I wrote them on the same day I published them.

I can say in retrospect that publishing something every day did feel meaningful. I don’t feel that not writing every single day reduced the feeling of accomplishment. In order to “earn” a day off, I had to pre-write material earlier, so that definitely didn’t feel like cheating.

The added flexibility of batch blogging was nice to have, but I didn’t lean on it as much as I thought I would. I still prefer to publish most material as soon as it’s done. It feels a bit weird to force an article to be held back for a few days once it’s ready. I feel more in sync with the flow of life when I share something immediately after creating it, and I think that syncs up better with the people who read the articles and watch the videos too.

I never created an editorial calendar or a mega-list of ideas to write about. I prefer to invite the flow of inspiration as a present-moment experience, as I shared previously in the How I Write article. So on almost all days of this challenge, I decided what I was going to write about just before I began writing each day. If you asked me an hour before I started writing what I was going to write about that day, I usually couldn’t have told you.

For the rare batch blogging days, I would generate the ideas on the same day I wrote those posts. One day I tried to pre-outline some article ideas on index cards, planning to write those articles the next day. I ended up scrapping all of those ideas because the energy behind them was too dead after 24 hours. The cards that felt lively on one day felt lifeless the next. It’s always a better experience if I give expression to ideas on the same day they show up. An idea is pretty much worthless when the inspirational energy that delivered it has receded. I have to ride the waves as they arrive. I can’t surf yesterday’s waves.

Testing the Limits of Creative Expression

One reason I wanted to do this challenge was to more deeply explore my relationship with creative expression. I gained some interesting realizations along these lines, but they didn’t come from the directions that I expected.

Before I committed to this challenge, I wondered what it would be like to demand more from the flow of inspiration. I’ve had a great connection with this flow for many years. I never get writer’s block. I was curious what would happen if I really amped up my output by demanding more from it than ever before.

It turned out that as I demanded more ideas, more ideas showed up with relative ease. I didn’t feel like I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for more to write about. I actually feel like I did some of my best writing this year, and I received a lot of feedback to that effect as well. While I did write about some old and familiar topics, I also discovered and shared many new insights. And I stretched myself in a lot of different ways. This was a year of a lot of growth and change, and I always had plenty of ideas to explore through writing.

The coronavirus situation was a bit of a gift in that regard. This was a very different kind of year than I expected. I actually felt lucky that I picked this year for this challenge. I thought I was going to have to work around a lot of trips that I’d be taking this year, such as by writing some articles in airports, on planes, or at hotels, but I haven’t left Las Vegas since January. At least I got to visit the Panama Canal that month.

I thought the most interesting part of this challenge would be having to stretch myself to keep up with a faster creative flow. Would I need to develop new ways of accessing the flow of inspiration if my old way of interfacing proved inadequate? That part was actually pretty easy though. Demanding more ideas just invited more inspiration, and it never dried up. If there was a creative limit there, I never reached it.

That alone is a cool realization to have. It makes me feel a bit more ambitious about future creative work. I pushed myself along one creative dimension this year, and I felt connected to even more inspirational vastness.

It’s like playing the game where you fall backwards into someone else’s arms, and you have to trust that they’ll catch you. This year I fell into the arms of inspiration, and it caught me. Then it gave me a look that said, Was there ever any doubt?

I’ve long had an abundant relationship with the flow of creative expression. But this year it feels like I took that relationship to a new level of trust and depth. This is actually kind of exciting. I feel like it opens up a bigger world of possibilities. I’m not sure where I’ll take this next. I’d like to give myself some time and space after this challenge to ponder those possibilities. I still feel like I’m inside the challenge right now as I wrap it up.

I’m really looking forward to NOT doing the daily publishing in the coming year. It does take up significant creative bandwidth, and I want to see what else I can do with this bandwidth. I would like next year to have a lower volume of publishing, so I can explore this fascinating relationship in other ways.

I’m especially looking forward to creating and publishing an all new deep dive course about creative productivity in the first quarter of 2021 (most likely in the range of February / March); of course you’re invited to join me for that. Would you like to learn how to create and publish a huge volume of quality material without breaking a sweat, without worrying about criticism, and without getting writer’s block? I think there’s a lot that I can teach about this that would make for a unique and different approach.

Note that it’s also pretty easy to enjoy financial abundance if you can do the equivalent of writing and publishing several new books each year. Being able to consistently tune into the flow of creative expression is a gift that keeps on giving.

My Relationship with Other Publishing Platforms

With such frequent publishing, I was able to notice more subtleties and nuances in how I felt about various decisions along the way, like which topics I wrote about, when I did my writing, and where I published material. I feel that this helped me clarify which decisions felt most aligned and which felt semi-misaligned.

For example, it became even more obvious that the morning hours are my best time for creative work. I did most of my creative output well before noon each day, and that still feels good to me.

What probably surprised me most was getting more clarity about how I felt about different publishing platforms.

I love publishing to my blog/website and within CGC best. Those outlets always felt beautifully aligned.

While sharing in other places seems like a logically good idea – for business reasons, for reaching more people, and for creating more ripples – this year I’ve felt increasingly misaligned with that choice.

I thought I might do more YouTube videos this year, but I only created about a dozen more of them, including recording 8 videos in one day. I’m super comfortable on video, and I’ve been doing live video recordings in CGC most weeks since 2017. I have to face the truth that I just don’t like YouTube that much though. The vibe of it feels a bit off to me. I like watching other people’s videos there, but I don’t seem to mesh with using YouTube as a major publishing platform. Occasionally posting something to YouTube is okay now and then, but I don’t feel drawn to invest in that platform in a bigger way as a contributor. I just feel really blah about using it.

For a while now I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing future public videos to Vimeo only (I have a paid Vimeo account) and to my blog and not bothering with YouTube at all. Sharing on YouTube would mean more views of course, but I’m more into alignment than viewer counts. I think I might actually enjoy making more videos if I cut YouTube out of the picture. I enjoy doing the educational segments and coaching calls in CGC, and those are never published to YouTube. As soon as I weave into my thinking that I’ll be publishing a video to YouTube, my motivation to make the video actually goes down.

This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any reactions or interactions on YouTube. By and large those are normally pleasant and positive, although I don’t engage in the comments much. People do seem to like and appreciate the videos I post there. Some have been asking for more videos too. I can’t point to anything external as being a source of problems. Logically it looks okay to me. On the inside though, my intuition keeps signaling that continuing to invest in that platform isn’t part of any meaningful path with a heart going forward. Somehow YouTube feels like yesterday’s index card.

I’d say that’s the main reason I didn’t publish much to YouTube this year. The vast majority of video that I recorded this year was published elsewhere and won’t be appearing on YouTube. I also feel that the material I share on video that isn’t published on YouTube is way better than what I have published on YouTube. It’s like there’s something about that platform that creates enough friction to make me want to keep my best video material away from it.

I share these feelings because I’m being honest, not because I fully understand them. If you’ve felt similarly towards YouTube or other publishing platforms and you have any insights or thoughts about this, I’d love to hear about it.

I also mostly shunned Instagram this year. That platform really doesn’t resonate with me. Mostly I just find it annoying and crippled, like trying to blog with only one finger. The people I’ve connected with there are mostly great. I just don’t like the platform itself. I’m not a photographer and have no desire to become one. I’m also not a heavy phone user, and I don’t want to become one either. On a scale of 1 to 10, I don’t see Instagram going higher than a 2 for me. I gave it a shot a while back. I just think it sucks. If you like it, that’s fine for you. It’s not for me though.

I shared most blog posts this year on Facebook, but I’ve mainly been on that platform to participate in a paid coaching program whose community is in a private Facebook group. That program ended a couple of weeks ago. So I’m pondering if I want to bother using Facebook going forward. It also feels pretty blah as a platform choice these days.

I think part of these issues stem from CGC. The interactions I experience in CGC have spoiled me because they’re richer and more meaningful than what I experience elsewhere. While it’s sometimes nice to connect with people on other platforms, especially old friends, those interactions are usually pretty shallow compared with what I’m accustomed to in CGC. So while I feel semi-repulsed by some external publishing platforms, I feel a more magnetic pull to engage with other CGCers. I think this feeling has amplified within the past few months.

This year has encouraged me to question other ways to frame how I think about my online business. More than 25 years ago, I adopted a try-before-you-buy business to sell computer games. I would share the free demos far and wide, and this would attract some percentage of the freebie downloaders to become customers. Some people think of this as a funnel-based model.

I can also view my current business model through this lens. I can say that my free material attracts lots of people to my website or social media accounts, and some of them become customers. My reach and conversion rate have been strong enough for many years to make this a viable business model.

But what’s the pathway to grow with this approach? You have to cast a wider net, or you have to improve the conversion rate, right? And that framing really doesn’t excite me. People aren’t fish, and I don’t see myself as reeling them in or seducing them. I’m really not interesting in sucking people into a funnel and optimizing the funnel. Blah!

If you’ve been reading my blog this year, you’ll notice that the vast majority of my posts aren’t salesy and have no links to anything paid. They really are just meant to help people, and that’s the intention I hold when I write them. I’ll link to courses and such when it seems relevant, but I don’t want to go out of my way to do that when it doesn’t fit the flow of inspiration.

So I recognize that my natural actions and behaviors aren’t really aligned with a funnel-based frame anyway. Even if I presume that such a model has been working for me all these years, I normally don’t hold this model in mind when doing creative work or serving CGC members. So it seems rather out of sync with my actual experience. It doesn’t mesh with how I normally think about my business and the creative work I do.

I actually like writing articles just to share and explore ideas and to connect with people. I don’t need anymore motivation than that. And obviously this kind of motivation works well for me. It would screw up my creative flow if I tried writing with a funnel-based framing in mind.

I am curious what would happen if I just stopped bothering to participate in other publishing platforms and focused entirely on my blog, customers, and CGC. I like to serve the people who show up, and I prefer not to worry about where they come from. When I branch out from this core, I tend to do a half-assed job of it anyway since the motivation and inspiration just aren’t there.

I also like that within a certain sphere around my work, I’m able to maintain a certain purity of intent. On other platforms I feel like I’m enmeshed in some corruption of that intent, which doesn’t feel good to me.

I like to create abundance through depth. Instead of having to do tons of outside research to capture and analyze ideas, I generate most of my creative output from within. I explore and experiment a lot. I dialogue with reality. I tune into the flow of inspiration. And it seems like I can do this indefinitely without burning out.

What does burn me out is when I try to do anything that feels misaligned for too long. My life seems to get better in direct proportion to my willingness to shun and reject misaligned approaches, even when I think I have good logical reasons for clinging to them.

So this year of daily blogging has given me a lot to think about. I’m glad I committed myself to this and followed through.

Overall I enjoyed the experience. I’m definitely not burned out by it. I still feel creatively inspired.

I don’t need to have another year of the same though. It will be very nice to channel my creative flow differently in 2021.

Happy New Year! 🙂

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Your Relationship With Text Messaging

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How would you rate your current relationship with texting on a scale of 1 to 10?

A 1 means you really need to improve how you use this tool. A 10 means you’re using the tool in a way that works very well for you, and other people who text you understand and respect your boundaries.

I feel that I have a healthy relationship with text messaging. It’s generally not a distraction, I use it effectively, and my approach works well for me. Boundary issues are uncommon and easily fixed.

So let me share some tips regarding how I use it. See if any of this helps you reassess your own relationship with texting.

  • Define your desired relationship with texting in advance. Instead of addressing issues only in a reactive bottom-up matter, get clear about the role you want this tool to play in your life. What are the justifiable and intelligent use cases for it? What uses would be distracting and should be considered out of bounds? I encourage you to write up your own personal list of do’s and don’ts for the tool.
  • Look at problems behaviorally. Texting is a set of behaviors. If your behaviors are aligned with your intentions, you’ll likely have a healthy relationship with this tool. If you’re not happy with your relationship with this tool, look at your behaviors: what you typed and when. Call out the mistakes you made. Identify exactly what you should have done instead? Example:
    • I initially responded with, “Nice to hear from you.” That was a mistake. I didn’t want to get into a conversation at that time.
    • I should have replied with, “Busy with a project. No texting today please. Thanks for understanding.”
    • Better yet, I should have left notifications turned off and my phone in the other room.
  • Make permanent changes. Review some of your recently texted conversations. Which ones were worthwhile and intelligent uses of the tool, where you used it in the right way and at the right time? Which conversations were distracting or problematic in any way for you? For the problematic ones, state the problem in the most general terms. Then solve that problem permanently with a change in your commitment regarding what you consider fair use of the tool versus off limits.
  • Accept conflict. Your relationship with this tool may not align with how everyone else wants you to use this tool. Decide which is more important: satisfying someone else’s demands and expectations… or having a healthy and productive relationship with the tools and people in your life? If you want the latter, you’ll need to define and enforce boundaries. When someone can’t or won’t respect your boundaries, add them to your blocklist.
  • Finish conversations. How many perpetually open conversations are you having via text messaging? Ideally it’s zero. Open a conversation, have the conversation, and close the conversation. Every conversation that’s left open is an open loop that can distract you. Finish listening to what needs to be heard, and finish saying what needs to be said. Close the loop, and end the conversation. When you’ve closed it, say to yourself, “This is done.”
  • Build a repertoire of conversation closers. Here are a few:
    • Time to get back to work.
    • Bye for now.
    • Glad we figured this out.
    • Glad to be of help.
    • Dinner time for me.
    • Hugs!
    • Ciao!
    • ❤️❤️❤️
  • Keep your phone outside of your workspace. If your phone is your primary texting device, and if your work doesn’t primarily involve texting, leave your phone elsewhere while working. I leave mine in the kitchen while I work in my home office.
  • Respond on your schedule. If you always respond to people immediately when they text you, you’ll train them to expect that. If this works for you, great. But if not, just respond when it’s convenient. I often don’t reply to texts for a day or two.
  • Have the conversations you want. If you don’t want to be having a texting conversation, end it. Say a deliberate yes to the invitations you want. Note that you don’t need anyone’s permission to end a conversation. If you end the conversation on your side, it’s over. If the person keeps peppering you with texts afterwards, ask yourself if you ever want anyone using texting with you in that way. If not, warn them if you’d like, turn on “Do not disturb” for a few hours, and consider the blocklist as a backstop if necessary.
  • Educate people on your preferences. It’s up to you to train people to learn how and why they can text you. If you don’t make adjustments, they’ll likely assume their communication habits are okay. If anything is not okay with you, let the other person know. Don’t blame them. Just specifically share how you’d like them to modify their behaviors. Invite them to commit to that change. Some examples:
    • Don’t text me about typos in articles. Always email or use the contact form on my website for that.
    • Don’t expect an immediate reply from texting. I’m not an immediate reply kind of guy.
    • Text me when you’re about 5 minutes away.
    • Text me after you finish going through Customs.
    • Don’t text me memes.
    • Don’t text me bad jokes. Only good ones. 🙂
  • Practice better texting. For any habits you need to adjust, do a practice texting session by yourself. Use any notes app, and type predictable lines from the other person and your desired responses. Even a few minutes of solo practice can help your brain correct bad habits. Teach your brain how you want it to respond in situations where you need to adjust your behavior.
  • Play is fine, but watch for boundary issues. It’s fine to text playfully when you and the other person are in the mood for it. Same goes for sexy exchanges if they’re consensual. Just consider if you’re engaging for pleasure-based reasons or as a way of distracting yourself from something else you should be doing instead. Playfulness can build stronger relationships, but it can also damage relationships if you overdo it.
  • Trust your instincts. If something feels off to you, it’s off. Sometimes it’s good to verbalize your feelings aloud, like “I don’t want to have this conversation right now” or “I should ask if this is a good time to discuss this first.” Practice acting in alignment with your instincts.

How is your current relationship with text messaging working for you? This type of tool will probably be around for many more years, so it’s wise to make this a healthy and positive relationship. When this relationship isn’t working well, it becomes an added source of stress. When this relationship is working well, it can add meaningful value and connection to your life.

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Overcoming Digital FOMO

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One reason people succumb to digital clutter like clogged inboxes and excessive browser tabs is that they’re being too clingy with digital content.

There’s an overwhelm of digital content, and you may feel the need to capture and save lots of it, hopefully to be digested later.

Having an intelligent capture system can help, but it’s also wise to reduce the flow if you’re frequently overflowing your inboxes with new ideas.

Here are some tips to help you overcome digital clinginess.

  • Test being 100% caffeine-free for at least a month. Regular caffeine consumption can make it harder to prioritize by making trivial items seem more important than they are. Caffeine is also addictive, and any addiction tends to encourage other addictive patterns, thereby weakening your self-discipline.
  • Use the OHIO rule: Only handle it once. Make each decision about what to do with digital content as soon as it comes up.
  • Make no your default. Each piece of digital content is an invitation that must be justified. Unless you can say “hell yes” to it, let it go and close it.
  • Favor immersive learning instead of chaotic learning. If a topic really interests you, do a focused deep dive into it. Read several books. Seek and out read worthwhile articles. Take a course. Then let it go completely when you feel you’ve digested enough info to satisfy you for now. When you realize that there’s something meaningful and new to explore in that same field, plan another focused deep dive. Consume content from a full glass, not a sippy cup.
  • Ignore suggestions except when you’re actively asking for them. What would you read next if you had no “to read” list? Could you invite suggestions, pick and buy several new books, and then read them till done? When you have your stack, you can ignore all other suggestions till you actually need more.
  • Consider a now or never framing when faced with a quick suggestion. Handle it now, or let it go forever. If you decline it once and it’s important enough, it will be raised again.
  • Don’t look. You can use social media without ever looking at other people’s feeds. Just interact in your own space regarding the ideas you share. Don’t subject yourself to a flurry of random ideas from other people that will clutter your mind multiple times per day.
  • Look at your goals and projects more than at other people’s input and suggestions. If your goals aren’t as interesting, set more interesting goals. If you keep turning your attention away from your goals, your goals are probably too boring.
  • Ask anti-FOMO questions. You may have a tendency to over-focus on questions like “What if I need this?” when considering whether to keep something. Develop a counter-voice that pushes back with objections like “Could this be clutter?” and “What difference will this make to my life 10 years from now?” and “Shouldn’t I be working on my goals instead?”
  • Limit subscriptions. Set a limit for how many email lists you can subscribe to, like a max of five. When you add one, drop an old one. Follow no more than 10 YouTube channels. For each subscription, ask how it’s helping you achieve your goals.
  • Practice digital minimalism. Delete apps you don’t love. Clear your desktop of clutter. Reduce your bookmarks by 80%. Remove distracting visual reminders that your brain must constantly process. If it’s on the screen in front of you, some part of your brain is processing it.
  • Delete accumulated digital clutter. Would you feel lighter if you deleted your least relevant terabyte of saved data? Of all the data you’ve piled up, what will you actually need to keep during the next decade or two of your life? Is any of that anchoring you to the past? Would you discover some extra freedom by letting much of it go? If you only kept 50 gigs, what would you keep?

Be careful with digital FOMO because this mindset can really clutter up your life if you don’t stay on top of it. When you notice that some part of your digital life is becoming bloated and unwieldy, reset your approach. Demolish the bloat and restore a sense of ease and lightness.

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Signs of a Weak Capture System

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A common sign that you have a weak or under-utilized system for capturing and organizing your tasks and projects is that you’re trying to use some non-system as a substitute.

This includes bad habits such as these:

  • Leaving browser tabs open that aren’t related to the current task
  • Leaving emails sitting in your inbox after you’ve read them the first time
  • Having cluttered inboxes in other apps
  • Using any messaging app to remember some to-do items
  • Having messy and disorganized reference storage on any devices (hard drives, SSD storage, USB sticks, SD cards, cloud storage, etc)
  • Unprocessed physical clutter, especially information-based (stacks, piles, papers, sticky notes, unread books)
  • Digital or physical subscriptions that pile up unread
  • Using multiple apps to capture tasks
  • Having reminders of to-do items spread across multiple apps or physical locations
  • Not being sure which inbox to send your tasks to
  • Trying to to use a system you don’t actually like
  • Worrying about tasks falling through the cracks
  • Relying on your human memory to keep reminding yourself about tasks you need to attend to

A good system has at most two inboxes: one digital inbox and one paper inbox.

A good system has one calendar for keeping track of your time-based commitments. You can also set it to proactively remind you of appointments when necessary, so you don’t have to rely on your memory or constantly looking at the clock for that.

Your email inbox isn’t a calendar or a project management system. Nor is your web browser.

A good system has effective long-term reference storage. The structure and orderliness of it needn’t be superb, but nor should it be a sloppy mess of clutter. You can probably tell if your current reference system is good enough for you needs based on how you feel about using it.

A good system doesn’t show you reminders of your to-dos except when you need to see them. It doesn’t distract you by showing you the same unprocessed emails every time you check your inbox.

Your system can have many lists, including reading and watching lists with the appropriate links and references. Your web browser tabs aren’t “to read” and “to watch” lists, and trying to use them as such is immensely distracting.

Your subconscious mind doesn’t need to chew on browser tabs that are irrelevant to your current focus. If you still think it’s cool, cute, or justifiabe to have dozens of browser tabs open, do the one browser tab challenge and see for yourself what a different it makes.

If you need help with the basics of setting up a decent capture and task management system, I’d recommend the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. It will get you started setting up a proper system. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than destroying your focus with dozens of browser tabs and cluttered inboxes.

I’m still using Nozbe (Mac app) for my personal task management. I shared some details about how I use it in the series on reducing mental effort. There are lots of good apps you can use, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find one that you like.

Not having a good capture system is a problem worth solving. Consider that if you don’t solve it soon, you’re punting the problem to the future, cursing your future self with more distraction and degraded focus year after year. That will absolutely drag down the results you’re able to create and the quality of life you’re able to enjoy. You can solve this problem permanently. You can leave it in the past so that it never plagues you again.

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One Browser Tab Only

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It scares me when people tell me they have 10+ web browser tabs regularly open at the same time. For some it’s well into the dozens. This isn’t intelligent behavior; it will have a negative impact on your mental functioning if you make this a habit.

How is it possible to have 10+ browser tabs open regularly and not have some part of you crying out to learn single-handling?

You probably don’t even see how distracted your mind is while doing this. If you’ve been doing this long enough, it may even seem normal for you. That’s a dreadful situation to find yourself in. I suggest you break the habit.

Each tab is an open loop. Each tab is a distraction from the task you’re focused on – if you can even call a multi-tabbed life focused at all. Each tab weakens your self-discipline.

Look at all those open tabs and say to yourself, “This is NOT intelligent behavior. This is weakness. This is distraction. This is indecision. It’s time to put a STOP to this.”

Here’s a challenge for you. Do a 30-day trial of using only one browser tab. Never open a second tab during that month.

One tab is plenty.

Multiple tabs can be a useful feature in limited situations, but it’s so easy to abuse it. If you regularly have 10+ tabs open – seriously even 3+ tabs – it’s a safe bet that you’re well into abuse territory. Your focus, productivity, and discipline will almost certainly improve during a 30-day one-tab-only challenge.

Yes, you’ll make a few minor sacrifices where having multiple tabs open would be a nice feature to have, but it’s way more important to put a stop to the abusive pattern. You may be surprised to see how little you actually need multiple tabs. This challenge will make you pause and think before you act impulsively and keep opening more and more.

That isn’t to say that you can never use tabs again, but it’s wise to use them judiciously and not just keep adding open loops. Every open loop sucks part of your attention away, and this makes you less attentive to what you’re doing.

If a single tab is too boring, you’ll probably realize that you don’t need to be web browsing at all. Multiple tabs can drown you in false tasks that don’t need to be done at all. A single-tab challenge will get you turning towards more meaningful challenges. While multiple tabs may look like a form of abundance, they create scarcity in your ability to focus.

If you can’t do this challenge, then I assert that you’re addicted to distracting yourself. Lots of people are, so there’s nothing extraordinary about that. It is powerful to recognize (or to at least suspect) that this behavior is degrading your mental functioning, and challenge your brain to break the habit. At least give yourself the gift of self-awareness, so you can see the difference in what it would be like to use only one tab for a month. Then you’ll know what this is costing you.

At first this challenge will make you feel awkward and stunted. It will be tempting to open one more tab. But it’s only for 30 days. Tell yourself that you can open all the tabs you want on Day 31. See it as a new experience to raise your awareness and build more discipline and focus. Accept the awkwardness of it; it will get easier after a few days.

Don’t cheat by opening multiple browsers or by using multiple devices at the same time. Put your focus on one window and one task.

You could also extend this to using one app at a time.

This is meant to be a temporary reset. You can have a productive relationship with multiple browser tabs once again. If you have other tabs open right now that aren’t 100% needed for your current task at hand though, close them.

When I use a web browser, I normally have only one tab open. Occasionally I’ll open multiple tabs to queue up tasks in a linear progression, like multiple course lessons to go through or different articles to read. Then I go through the tabs in linear order, one by one, closing them when I’m done with them.

When I’m not actively using my web browser, I close the browser app, and any open tabs are closed automatically, but usually there’s only one tab anyway. I always open my browser to a blank slate. When I’m not active using my computer, all apps are usually closed.

As I’m writing this blog post, I have only one tab open. That’s normally the case when writing. Why would I want my visual cortex processing anything in my visual field that could distract me from writing? That would only slow me down.

If I wanted to regularly keep 10+ tabs open, I’d have to be drunk in order to silence the part of my mind that would be screaming about the damage I’d be doing to my long-term ability to focus. I think it’s healthy to develop this part of your brain – the part that will staunchly defend your focus from incursions.

There are some decent use cases for having multiple tabs open, and a few of them may apply when you’re doing certain tasks. But that isn’t a justification for abusing the tabs feature to the point of scrambling your focus every day. Look at your current open browser tabs, and name the use case that makes this intelligent behavior. Or just shake your head in disgust and admit that it’s really not intelligent to live like this. It’s not a cute habit. It’s not funny. You really are hurting yourself.

Thirty days from now, you could emerge with more self-control and self-awareness. You could know what it’s like to step back from a habit that isn’t serving you. You could free up more mental and emotional capacity. You could refactor the way you use an important tool that you’ll be using for many more years. You have little to lose and a lot to gain.

Will you do the challenge?

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Heartstorming

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Heartstorming is brainstorming with the heart (or the emotional part of your brain).

The mental kind of brainstorming is good for generating problem-solving ideas. It’s useful for mapping out the logical space of solutions. Generate lots of ideas, and sift through them to pick the best ones.

That kind of brainstorming, however, is terrible for setting goals and priorities, especially big picture goals for your life.

That’s because you can’t set priorities dispassionately. Goals are emotional in nature. The logical brain doesn’t distinguish between the value of brushing your teeth versus transforming someone’s life. You have to feel your way into priorities.

Evaluating Options

How do you evaluate options on a brainstorming list? You’ll likely evaluate them based on effectiveness, practicality, or impact – or something along those lines.

To evaluate options on a heartstorming list, look for emotional resonance. Look for passion, excitement, playfulness, love, joy, silliness, connection, scariness, etc. Look for ideas that rile you up and make you want to take action. Look for ideas that might scare or embarrass you. Notice which ideas keep drawing your attention, even if they seem a bit ludicrous.

What if none of your ideas are like that? Then you suck at heartstorming. That’s okay. Lots of people suck at this because many of us are taught a different way of thinking that gets in the way of heartstorming. We learn to silence the voice of our hearts. Big mistake… but we can correct that.

Young children tend to be naturally good at heartstorming. Ask a kid what they want for a gift. Then listen to their answers. Are they brainstorming or heartstorming? You’ll probably see mostly heartstorming, including answers that may be impractical or illogical but which clearly have some emotional resonance.

You probably knew how to do heartstorming when you were very young. Did you lose touch with this skill? Have you forgotten (or overlooked) the value of doing this as an adult? How’s that working out for you?

The Value of Heartstorming

I rely on heartstorming more than brainstorming for making decisions about what to do with my life. I imagine what would be fun, fascinating, courageous, a little bit insane, growth-oriented, social, creative, and so on. I look for emotional resonance. Then I pick something that fascinates me, and I push my brain to get with the program. My brain almost always objects initially – it’s stubborn that way – but the heart is very powerful when it leads.

A brainstormed goals list would include things like making a certain amount of money. That’s boring as hell, Mr. Scrooge. It’s logical, but why should the heart care? It probably doesn’t care. So where will the fire come from? Your motivation to act will probably evaporate as soon as you set a goal like that. Your money goal just makes everyone yawn.

A heartstormed goals list will include weird and wild ideas that you’re afraid to share with other people. But some of these goals will excite your heart anyway. And if you describe them to other people, their brains will likely reject those goals, but their hearts may feel some resonance. And if they’re really in tune with their hearts too, they may even encourage you to go for it.

One of my heartstormed goals is to visit every Disney theme park in the world with my wife. We’ve been to all six USA parks, so we have six left: Paris (2), Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo (2). Is this a logical goal? Nope! It just sounds like fun. So we’ll probably do it (when it’s safe to do so). We’ve been to Paris twice before, so it would be a simple matter to pick that one up, but this goal will also get us to visit Asia finally.

I especially love that I have a wife who enjoys working on heart-based goals and having heart-based experiences together. That’s a special kind of joy when I can share a wild idea with her, and her reaction is basically, “You had me at hello.”

Heartstormed goals that feel emotionally resonate are easier to act on. Motivation is emotional, so if you lean into the emotional aspects, it’s way easier to flow into action.

What’s also great about heartstormed goals is that because action is easier, you can achieve more goals. Additionally, you’ll pick up some head-based goals that come along for the ride; they’re easier to achieve when you use a heart-first approach.

I like to pick fun and interesting projects that also happen to generate income, as opposed to setting income-based goals. I do my best to make the income-generating parts fun too. One day I earned $30K while spending a day at Disneyland with my wife. Doing an online launch while going to Disneyland isn’t a logical goal, but it is fun and motivating. I enjoy the silliness of it. And oddly it’s easier for me to earn money in ways that are silly or unusual.

Brainstormed goals make your brain lazy. Your brain will come up with the most dreadfully dull and predictable ideas that you probably aren’t going to implement anyway.

But if you assign idea generation to your heart, it will fill up your list with wild and crazy ideas, some of which will indeed be stupid, but others will be fun and worthwhile. The best ideas will challenge your brain to stretch creatively. They’ll expand your conception of what’s possible. They’ll wake you up.

Would you rather earn an extra $30K by slaving away at some corporate job for however long that takes? If so, keep generating ideas from your headspace. For the heart, earning an extra $30K is a fun and silly goal – pretty easy when you’re motivated and creative.

Would you rather put your heart in charge of your project choices and demand more from your brain? Why the hell can’t you earn $30K in a day while going in rides at Disneyland? And do this with your best friend and lover that you enjoy spending time with? Create fun memories together, and get paid for the experience. With the heart there’s no compromise. You get enjoyment and results. You get a full, rich, and balanced life.

The logical brain generates embarrassingly crappy priorities – so uncreative, unambitious, and uninspiring.

When you do heartstorming, you’ll probably be laughing and crying along the way. Sometimes you’ll get scared by an idea. You should FEEL something as you generate ideas. The emotion should get stronger as you dive deeper into heartspace.

How to Heartstorm

Give this a try. It’s very easy, but it does take practice.

Open a new page in your journal. Write at the top what kind of list you want to make. Then start typing or writing ideas. But instead of focusing on your brain to generate ideas, put your attention on your heart. Go into your heartspace, and listen from there. Invite your emotions to speak. Tell your logical brain to shut up for a while. Invite your heart to generate ideas.

Pretend you’re four years old again. You can do this. It’s a no-brainer. 😉

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Goals of Being

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Many years ago one of my goals for public speaking was to design and deliver my own three-day workshop on the Las Vegas Strip. I first achieved that goal in 2009. That was a goal of doing.

Another goal I had for public speaking was to develop such strong comfort with public speaking that I could feel fully present in front of an audience, so I could be spontaneous and in the moment and not feel anxiety or nervousness – just enjoyment, fun, playfulness, and connection. I achieved that goal somewhere along the way. I demonstrated it at the three-day 2015 Conscious Heart Workshop, delivered spontaneously with lots of fun, playfulness, and inspiration in the moment – and no nervousness or anxiety. There was no plan or content preparation for that workshop. I facilitated it from the flow of inspiration and audience suggestion moment by moment. That was a goal of being.

At another time I had a goal of writing a book and getting it published. That was achieved in 2008. More doing.

But I also had a goal of writing that book in a way that I could always feel really good about it, and I wouldn’t feel like I’d outgrown it a decade or two later. I wanted to have a timeless relationship with that book and its principles throughout my life. More being. I still feel such a connection to that book, now 12 years after it was published.

The culture that I find myself within gives a lot of weight to doing and not enough to being. Pursuing goals “at all costs” is lauded by many. But we pay a price for this focus – a loss of connection to being.

When you set goals for the New Year (or anytime really), give some attention to the beingness aspects, not just to your activities and results.

Beingness is surprisingly powerful. A lot of doingness takes care of itself if you invest in the right experience of beingness.

Results of Beingness

Here are some examples of goals that I’ve achieved that have enhanced my life greatly, which have more to do with being than doing.

  • I’m in a long-term relationship with a woman who makes me smile when I see her. We laugh together every day. Even after spending so much time together, especially this year, I still look forward to more time with her.
  • My vegan diet forever changed the way I relate to animals. I look upon them with a sense of fellowship and reverence, not as objects to be bought and consumed.
  • I have written millions of words of published content, but for me the more important goal was learning to write from inspiration. I never get writer’s block. That’s due to trust, not because of self-discipline. I don’t have to force anything. I’ve learned how to invite, tune into, and trust the flow. With the right beingness, the doingness is relatively easy. Most of the content I’ve written, including all of my blog articles and YouTube videos, are donated to the public domain, so anyone is free to republish, repurpose, or translate them.
  • I’m happy. I like my life. I look forward to each day. I often feel appreciative and grateful and lucky, not as some kind of deliberate practice but just as an automatic inner response. I’ve made it a priority to live my life in such a way that these feelings naturally arise. I say no to a lot of doing-based projects that would predictably reduce my happiness. I say yes to invitations and activities that will predictably increase my happiness. And I test that predictability now and then to see if my predictions are still accurate.
  • I get up at 5am each morning. This doesn’t require any force. I’m simply in love with the early morning hours. I seem to have a special relationship with that time of day. It’s that relationship that makes it easy to get out of bed – no force or discipline needed.
  • I feel that I have a healthy and positive relationship with money. I enjoy earning it and find it fairly easy to earn plenty of it when I want. I like spending it too. I like saving it. I invested a lot of thought and experimentation into improving my relationship with money – to drive out the fears and worries about it and to replace those fears and worries with play, trust, creativity, appreciation, inspiration, and other positive aspects of beingness. I used to struggle with money during my 20s, and that struggle didn’t occur during my 30s and 40s. This was solved not with more doing but with better being.
  • I have friends who inspire me to be a better person. I find that such people naturally flow into my life and stick around, not from working on my action-based social skills but from deepening my connection to the person I really want to be in each moment. When I express my beingness in the moment, people who are aligned with me seem naturally attracted to me. I also find it beautiful, remarkable, and empowering when someone else really expresses their beingness. It makes me feel in awe of that person. I tend to feel more awe from a person’s beingness rather than from their actions and accomplishments.

I tend to value my gains in beingness more than my gains in doingness. That’s because the right beingness makes the doing part easier and more fun.

Setting Goals of Being

I encourage you to actually set some goals of being. They may look like doing-based goals on the surface, but how you experience them is at least as important as the doing part. So the goal is really about the presence you bring to the experience.

Here are some examples:

  • Deliver a one-hour presentation with zero nervousness or anxiety.
  • Learn to enjoy doing your taxes that you file them at least a few weeks ahead of the due date. Find a way to fully enjoy the process with little or no resistance.
  • Earn $10K in one day, in a playful and inspired way. Form the intention, and then act on the flow of inspiration moment by moment. This seems like it’s about the doing, but it’s really about working through self-limiting beliefs and creating a more playful and inspired relationship with reality. You have to stop the self-censoring and self-doubt and learn to “yes, and” the ideas that flow through. This goals is nearly impossible if your relationship with inspiration is weak. It can be fun do it if that relationship is strong. You might even set such a goal and then find that you’re getting redirected towards an even better or bigger goal.
  • Prepare and eat a meal that’s super healthy, super delicious, and feels delightful to prepare it, eat it, and digest it. This requires that you really listen to how you’re connecting with the food during each step. And then you must be present to how your body is experiencing the food after you’ve eaten it.
  • Become a hugger. Become a person who gives and receives willing hugs, maybe even every day. Create a life rich in consensual touch. Oh, this was an amazing one to achieve, given my starting point. It took years to get there, but it was so worth it.
  • If you start a blog, YouTube channel, podcast, or something similar, define what kind of relationship you want to have with the many loops of creating and publishing new material that you’ll experience. What I’ve found helpful is that the process must be a growth experience for me; otherwise I’ll get bored and resist it. I also have to write for people I care about helping. This is more important than traffic or numbers. I need to love the process of creation. If I don’t love it, it means the beingness is wrong, and I need to approach it differently.
  • Make a really good, new friend. Good luck with turning this into a step-by-step action plan. With the right beingness though, this one is a lot easier. What makes you a good friend? Are you being that kind of person consistently?

So don’t just consider the what aspect of your goals. Pay great attention to the how and the why. Consider what kind of life you’re creating. Look at the inner experience of what it will be like to achieve your goals one way versus another way. There are so many ways to achieve results externally, but many approaches won’t feel very aligned or pleasant on the inside.

When you ignore the beingness aspect of a goal, you’ll likely sabotage the doingness part as well. It’s hard to take action when you’d rather procrastinate. If you’d rather play video games, how can you bring the beingness aspect that you enjoy while gaming into your other goals? What kind of player are you being in those game worlds? Are you being that player in other areas of life?

One sign that I have the beingness right is that I smile warmly when I think about my goals. It makes me happy to think about doing them. I look forward to working on them day by day. I’m not just motivated by the end result. I can savor the journey as well.

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Your Exploration Baseline

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When you explore something new, you’re exploring relative to a previous baseline.

When you explore a new diet, your baseline is your previous way of eating.

When you explore a new travel-rich lifestyle, your baseline is your previous stay-at-home lifestyle.

When you explore a new relationship and you weren’t in a relationship right before, your baseline is being single.

Your default baseline is your normal, usual, routine, or expected experience in that particular area of life. Your baseline is your status quo.

But does that have to be your baseline?

If exploration is relative to your baseline, what would happen if you changed your baseline first?

Moving Your Baseline

We can compare the year 2020 to the previous baseline of 2019. That comparison will surely make the COVID situation stand out. We could also compare 2020 to the baseline of 2015, and that may serve to further highlight the political differences. And if we used 1943 as our baseline, the year 2020 might seem like a relatively quiet and peaceful year.

It makes sense to interpret change relative to what came immediately before, but in the context of personal growth, you have the ability to change what comes before your explorations. You have the ability to redefine and establish new baselines.

You can use your current circumstances as your point of reference for further exploration. But you also have the power to establish very different baselines and to use those as your jumping-off points for further exploration. As it turns out, this can be immensely valuable.

For instance, if you want to travel throughout another country for an extended period, you could first establish a temporary “home base” in that country, such as by renting an apartment in one city there. Then you could use that base for further explorations, such as by taking excursions and trips to other parts of the country, always returning back to your new base each time. You base lets you live like a local for a while, giving you a different point of reference when exploring, so you aren’t in perpetual tourist mode.

Practical Explorations

Sometimes it’s easier, more useful, or more meaningful to explore from a different baseline instead of your usual default.

Here are some examples to get your mind churning on some possibilities:

Suppose you want to find your ideal wake-up time. You could start experimenting from your current baseline. Or you could become an early riser first, such as by getting up at 5am consistently. Make that your new baseline. See how that feels for a month or two. Then explore with different wake-up times to see how they perturb your results.

If your usual wake-up time is 9am, and you experiment with earlier wake-up times like 5am, 5:30am, or 6am, you may not notice much difference between them. But if you first establish 5am as your new baseline, you’re very likely to notice how different it feels in your body to get up at 5:30 or 6am. You’ll also have a new perspective on how it feels to stay up late.

Getting up at 5am consistently is my baseline. If I do any further sleep experiments, that’s my starting point. If I get up at 6am one morning, I’m sleeping in late because 5am is normal. If I experiment with doing anything “first thing in the morning,” it means I’ll be doing it before the sun comes up.

Suppose you want to improve your diet. You could experiment from your current diet, but that may not be nearly as useful as establishing a healthier baseline first. If your current diet is so-so, and you add in some healthier foods or subtract some unhealthy ones, you may not notice much difference. Add some celery and blueberries, and it may not even matter.

But suppose you establish your baseline to be a vegan, whole foods diet – no animal products and no processed foods. Then you experiment around that, such as by adding back some of the items you were having before, one at a time to see how each one affects you. See how some crackers affect you. See how your body responds to caffeine. See how some cheese affects you (if you even find it appealing anymore). This will give you much more clarity about which foods are helping you and which are hurting you.

The cleaner, simpler, and purer your dietary baseline is, the easier it is to discern how different foods affect you and whether those affects are positive or negative.

I went wheat-free for many weeks and then had some wheat pasta this week. I noticed the difference in my body shortly afterwards, experiencing minor cold-like symptoms, mild congestion, and some brain fog for a few hours. I also felt extra calm and peaceful shortly after I ate it. If I eat wheat regularly, I don’t usually notice any reactions, but if I experiment against a wheat-free baseline, I can see how it affects me more easily.

What’s your baseline for cleanliness and order in your home? If you live in a cluttered environment, you may not even notice the results of some modest organization improvements. But if your baseline is to keep your place neat and tidy by default, then some minor tweaks may have noticeable affects.

Declutter Your Baseline

One nice improvement you can make is to declutter your baseline. You’ll often learn more by simplifying and cleaning up your baseline first, and then see what happens when you add complexity.

If, however, you start with a complex situation and shift from one form of complexity to another, or from complexity to relative simplicity, it’s hard to identify clear and crisp lessons. You won’t be able to tell which specific changes are having the biggest impact. You won’t know where the key leverage points are.

It’s hard to tell what’s dragging you down or holding you back when your entire baseline is filled with issues that could be contributing to those affects. It could take a long time to isolate and identify problems when you have a dozen overlapping problems interacting with each other. But if you could first establish a relatively problem-free baseline, then you could selectively add back some complexity and immediately see when you cross back into problem space.

Upgrade Your Baseline

Another empowering way to use baselines is leverage them to elevate your routine experience, so you’re always returning to a pretty good default situation.

How happy are you with your current baselines in these areas?

  • Relationship situation
  • Social life
  • Diet
  • Exercise habits
  • Cleanliness
  • Productivity
  • Workspace
  • Income generation
  • Hobbies
  • Entertainment
  • Hygiene
  • Reading and education
  • Living situation
  • Travel
  • Creative expression

Raising your baseline takes time, but it’s a worthwhile investment. While it’s wonderful to have peak experiences now and then, you’ll spend a lot of your life living at your default baseline. So even if it takes a huge amount of effort to raise that baseline, it’s well worth it.

When I think back about some of the best decisions I’ve ever made, they often involved changes to my baseline in some area of life. They involved significant lifestyle adjustments, and some took years to reach, but they continue to provide ample rewards.

It’s especially wise to raise your baselines to the point where your everyday experience includes appreciation. A good question to ask yourself is: Do I appreciate my baseline in this area of life?

For instance, my income generation baseline is that I make money from fun, creative, inspiring, growth-oriented projects that improve people’s lives. Many years ago my old baseline included stress, scarcity thinking, acts of desperation, and focusing way too much on money instead of happiness, flow, caring, and trust. Notice that my current baseline is simpler and cleaner than the old one, especially without the clutter of stress, worry, and desperation – so much wasted energy. Note that trust, caring, and fun are much simpler – they do take more courage to implement, but they do not require more complexity.

Consider how much we complicate our lives just to avoid the simplicity of courage. What if courage was your baseline?

If you don’t like your baseline that much, why are you still there? Maybe it’s time to stop framing it as your current default. Be willing to drop a baseline that isn’t serving you well. A good baseline is a jumping-off point for further exploration, but it’s also a decent place to hang out between experiments.

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NaNoWriMo – Day 30

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Today is the final day of NaNoWriMo. I added about 2000 more words to my novel-in-progress this morning. My final word count for the month came in at 55,051 words. The challenge of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is to write 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days, so I exceeded this target by about 10%.

Here’s my daily progress log, showing my total word count (darker color) versus the daily pacing needed to hit 50K words (lighter color).

I surpassed the target pacing by a small amount on Day 1 and then padded my lead every day afterwards. It felt good to always be a little bit ahead throughout the challenge. I knew that if I just maintained this steady pacing, I’d never need to do any catch-up writing at the end.

Before starting this challenge, I learned that a major reason people fail at NaNoWriMo is that they fall behind in the first couple of weeks, and then they feel disheartened when facing the extra effort needed to catch up. Even skipping one day means you’ll have to write more in the remaining days. Most people who fall behind give up and don’t complete the challenge. This is an easily preventable point of failure.

My strategy was to approach this as a daily challenge, which plays to my strengths. I’ve done lots of 30-day challenges where I practice a specific behavior for 30 days in a row. In this case the desired behavior was to add at least 1667 words to my novel each day. If I just focused on that, the monthly goal would be accomplished too. It’s just typing after all.

Here’s what my daily word count looked like for all 30 days.

As you can see, I was pretty consistent throughout the month.

I averaged 1835 words per day, which works out to an extra 10% per day. Once I passed the 1667 words for the day, I kept writing till I felt like stopping, such as when I got to the end of a scene. If I felt like stopping but I wasn’t at 1667 words yet, I took a short break and then continued writing.

Final Reflections

This was a wonderful personal growth experience, and I’m glad I did it. The novel isn’t done and will need a lot of work to finish, but the daily writing got me well into the project.

I don’t have a completed book yet, and it would take a lot more work to drive this towards a version ready for publishing, but NaNoWriMo got me moving forward with meaningful progress. It helped me turn a mere idea into something a lot more tangible.

At this point I don’t have a completed story. I’ve written a first draft of many scenes. I have several well-developed characters. I have a well-structured three-act story with interesting plot twists. But there are still many more details to work out.

This is a very rough first draft. I’d say it’s not bad for a month’s work. I estimate that I averaged about 75 minutes per day of writing time (including thinking about what to write). I’m very pleased with how far I got for about 40 hours of effort. There was also some incubation time when I’d be thinking about characters or plot ideas while doing unrelated tasks.

The “words are cheap” mindset worked very well. It’s easy to throw words onto the screen, read them back the next day, and learn something useful. I’ll end up throwing away much of what I wrote this month, and I don’t lament that at all. Everything I wrote helped in some way. Each day I gained more clarity about the story, the characters, and the world. Even when what I wrote seemed like a chaotic mess, it still felt like forward progress.

Other writers have said that you write the first draft for yourself, not for anyone else. I adopted that mindset from Day 1, and I found it very helpful. I didn’t expect to show this early draft to anyone, not even Rachelle. So I just wrote whatever came to mind. It was my own personal exploration of the ideas and possibilities, nothing more. By framing it that way, I felt totally free to experiment and to make lots of mistakes. This helped me figure out what kind of story I wanted to tell. I let the words flow without any concern about who might read them.

One clear gain was that I understand my characters so much better than when I first started. Now I can write their words and actions much more easily, as if they tell me what they would say and do in every situation. So the writing got easier as I went along. The first few days were the most challenging; after that it was smooth sailing.

Another gain was that my “why” for writing this story improved as I kept writing. Around halfway through the month, I developed a stronger sense of purpose for why I wanted to write and share such a story. I had a more compelling answer to the questions: Why bother with this project? What’s the point? Who would want to read this? My purpose was more exploration-based in the beginning, but by the end I felt like I was creating something I really wanted to share with the world to see how it landed with people. I had a clearer sense of the story’s potential impact.

This was similar in some ways to designing a new video game from scratch, but the medium is very different. I liked how easy it was to explore the characters, story ideas, and world without having to deal with tech constraints. I could play around with any ideas I could imagine. I really enjoyed that type of experience – it was like pure play.

Most days I looked forward to my writing sessions. I didn’t experience much inner resistance after the first week, and that small resistance was just due to being too green at this type of writing. I think having lots of nonfiction writing experience – and a healthy willingness to make plenty of mistakes – was helpful. I never had writer’s block. I could connect with inspired ideas for fiction writing as easily as for nonfiction articles or courses.

Next Steps

I’m going to set aside the novel writing and coast into a more relaxed December since I want to focus on other aspects of life for the rest of the year. That includes finishing up my one-year daily blogging challenge, which has 31 days left to go.

Stephen King recommends setting aside a novel for at least 6 weeks after writing the first draft and then coming back it to fresh. He says it’s wise to get some distance from the story, so you can see it with fresh eyes before you start editing.

My first draft isn’t good enough that I can just edit it into a finished book. It’s way too messy for that, especially since there are a lot of scenes I’ll need to cut or rewrite differently. I’m still going to set this aside for 6+ weeks, probably until after our next deep dive is complete, but my next steps will different than Stephen King’s.

Sometime next year I’d like to revisit this novel project, re-read everything I wrote, and then begin working on a second draft. I’d like to do a round of more detailed plotting before I add more words to the book. I think the story would benefit a lot by clarifying the scene-by-scene layout.

The pantser approach was great for getting started since it helped me map out the possibility space for the story by writing a lot of scenes. Now I have enough understanding of the story and that characters that a good next step would be to map out the scenes for the story in the right order. I’d also like to fill out character and location sheets to fine-tune the characters and settings. Then I can write the second draft.

It’s going to be a long process, and I’m not in a rush to race through this. I do want to see this through to publishing. It’s an original story with some fun characters that I think people would enjoy reading. I might approach this project as a series of 30-day challenges to push it forward through different stages of development.

I’m especially happen that I framed NaNoWriMo in a way that made the experience enjoyable, especially by always being ahead of schedule. This makes me eager to re-engage with the novel when I’m ready. There are other priorities I want to engage with next, so I’m happy to put this aside for now, but I do look forward to getting back into it with fresh eyes.

Our Next Deep Dive

My first big priority for 2021 is to launch and develop our new creative productivity deep dive, which is tentatively called Amplify. This is for people who do creative work and want to increase their productive output. It’s also for people who’d like to get into a better creative flow. You could think of it as a course in how to be a prolific creator who publishes frequently. How can you express yourself creatively year after year without burning out?

I have tons to share about this topic that I believe would be unique and different from anything else out there. I’ve gone through many books and courses on creativity and on productivity, but I still haven’t seen really good coverage regarding connecting the dots between creativity and productivity. It’s like creativity is play, and productivity is work. There’s a lot of conflicting advice that treats creativity as inherently unproductive and productivity as inherently uncreative.

What if you want to excel at both together? What if you want to be a fountain of creative expression?

How can you be super creative and highly productive without sacrificing too much on either side? How can you get into the flow of creating and publishing – and stay there consistently without burning out?

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’m convinced that this is an area where I can add some real value to people’s lives. I’ve created and published across many different media: articles, videos, podcasts, a book, video games, music, live events, and more. This year I’ve published something new every single day, adding hundreds of thousands of words to my collective work, which is already well into the millions of words, not counting translations into other languages.

I love to keep exploring new media too, such as I just did with NaNoWriMo. Partly I did NaNoWriMo as an experiment to test some of the ideas for this upcoming deep dive.

I’d love to do this new deep dive co-creatively too, like we did with our previous ones, so the lessons will be created as we go, designed for the specific needs of the people who enroll.

I haven’t decided on the exact the format yet. My intuition says it will likely be something different from our previous courses, perhaps a combination of live interactive parts along with structured audio lessons. People loved the audio format of Submersion and Stature, and there was also something special about the live sessions that we did for Deep Abundance Integration. So I’m thinking of merging those for the new deep dive. Would that appeal to you?

I’ll share more info on this new deep dive next year as we get closer to launching it. We’ll be launching it during the first quarter of 2021. I tend to get an intuitive ping when the timing is right for launching. In the meantime, I’d like to clear my plate of some other projects first, mostly on the personal side.

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NaNoWriMo – Days 24-29

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I crossed the 50K-word NaNoWriMo finish line yesterday morning, writing 51,262 words in 28 days, so I achieved this goal 2 days ahead of schedule.

When I updated my word count yesterday, I received a congratulatory video, a bunch of links to claim the NaNoWriMo “prizes” (discounted promotions for various writer tools and services), and this completion certificate.

The way I framed this goal, however, was to add at least 1667 words per day to the novel for the full 30 days, so I didn’t stop after 28 days. After this morning’s writing session (Day 29), the novel is at 53,007 words. So tomorrow I’ll likely land around 55K words for this 30-day challenge.

Completing NaNoWriMo

This was my first NaNoWriMo and certainly a good year to do it. It was a great way to get started on a fiction book. I’m way further along now than I would have been if I hadn’t signed up for Nano. It’s been a rewarding experience overall.

One aspect I found less exciting than I expected was connecting with the Nano community. I thought it would be cool to connect with other novelists during Nano, but I felt a bit disconnected from that aspect of the experience. I didn’t feel like connecting with other writers while working on my novel. I browsed through some of the community posts but largely found it to be a distraction from actual writing, so most days I just did the writing on my own.

I enjoyed the challenge more when I stuck with introvert mode. It may be nice to connect with other writers before or after Nano, but I wasn’t inspired to do that while in the midst of figuring out the novel. I felt more motivated to connect with the characters I was developing.

I had no trouble feeling motivated to write each day. I didn’t write at same time each day, but I normally got each day’s writing done before 10am, often before 8am.

Most people who sign up for Nano don’t finish, but I never had any doubt that I’d do it. I do my best to win 30-day challenges in my mind before Day 1, and Nano was no different. The same goes for 365-day challenges like my 2020 daily blogging challenge (which is more than 90% done now). If you combine the blogging with the Nano writing, I probably wrote around 75K words this month.

Overall the combined writing experience flowed pretty well. Some days I blogged first and then did Nano, some days I flipped the order. But usually I finished both in the morning. Last Monday and Tuesday, I also did some batch blogging, queuing up several posts in advance, so I could enjoy the 4-day holiday weekend with a bit less daily writing – that was extra nice.

Leveraging the Fundamentals

One thing I love about having a career focused on exploring personal growth is how much time I have to spend practicing the fundamentals and how nicely that investment pays off over time.

This helps me leverage what I’ve learned to explore something new and be relatively productive from the start – and have fun doing it. Even when I’m a total newbie diving into an area where I have tons to learn, it feels like I have some extra advantages going in. A big one is just knowing that I can trust myself to follow through.

I expect to run into some difficulties or surprises along the way, and I also expect that I’ll be able to handle them. I’ll take action, persist, and learn as I go. I’m not afraid of failure, and I don’t tend to have issues with perfectionism. I prefer to just go, explore, and experience.

I like to play life the same way I like to play video games. Rachelle and I are about halfway through the new Zelda game, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, and I like that the game rewards my style of play – Rush in headfirst and slash away at every obstacle like there’s nothing to fear. We also pace ourselves, playing a little bit each day instead of rapidly binging through the whole thing.

The point of playing games is to have fun. This is a good way to approach life experiences too, including writing a novel.

I saw so many people in the Nano community struggling in ways that aren’t specific to writing. They struggle with personal development basics like setting clear goals, establishing productive habits, adopting empowering frames, creating confidence, eating healthfully, and so on.

But most of all, they struggle with making the journey fun, engaging, and rewarding each day. They inject far more suffering into the experience than necessary. Then they try to exert more discipline to push through that self-created drag, which can be very draining. I saw a number of “I give up” and “I’m quitting” updates along the way, and it looked to me that those people had already lost before Day 1. They approached the challenge in a way that was doomed from the start.

I saw plenty of uptightness in the Nano community. Some participants got bogged down in over-analysis and perfectionism. I think they could progress faster if they lightened up and learned to reframe failure as part of the fun. Some play the game so tightly that they prevent much of the joy of discovery from flowing through. It’s like playing a video game with someone who’s deathly afraid of losing a life, so they make the game more work than fun.

I actually found it stressful to read some of the community posts, but it was a good reminder that a long-term investment in personal growth fundamentals really does pay nice dividends. When you don’t practice the fundamentals enough, you’re likely to experience a lot of friction whenever you try to do something outside your comfort zone.

Practicing the fundamentals isn’t always sexy, but it helps us grow stronger, more capable, and more flexible. What good does it do to train up your writing skills if you can’t get yourself to apply those skills consistently? What if you lack the courage to create something unique that adds value to people’s lives? What if you aren’t able to handle criticism?

You can soak up domain-specific knowledge and skills, but what’s the point if you can’t get yourself to use it to create results?

This Nano experience helped me appreciate just how valuable it is to keep investing in the fundamentals. They grant access to new life experiences that would otherwise seem too far out of reach.

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