At the start of 2022, I set a goal for myself — I will write two articles a week on Medium.
I thought that was the minimum I should do, as I had several other writing commitments.
That was just 104 articles and in the previous year, I had written and published 100 articles in 100 days, without missing a beat.
I was going fine for the first five months of the year, and then the travel started. Since Medium had taken away the functionality, to write from mobile devices, I lost the continuity.
Instead, I started publishing my travel stories on LinkedIn.
One thing led to another, and I kept missing my goal.
In December, I usually go back to my annual goals and see how I went against them. I was horrified to find out that I was falling behind on many of them.
Here were my goals:
- 300+ LinkedIn posts
- 104 Medium articles
- 52 The Whimsical Writer Newsletter issues
- 17 Behind The Scenes issues for paid subscribers of the newsletter
- 3 Books
- 3 Mini-guides
Now when the time came to report on my end-of-year progress I found although I was on target with the LinkedIn posts and Newsletter issues, I was behind with the Medium articles, books, and Mini-guides.
Here is where I stand:
I had written only 67 articles in the whole year and was short by 27 articles.
I had written two mini-guides and still needed to write one
And although I had finished writing three books, I still needed to edit two of them.
Dilemma
Now, I can be lenient with myself and let go of these goals, promising myself that I will do better next year.
But then I will do the same next year.
But, if I meet my goals this year, it is likely I will meet them next year too.
Decision
So I decided, in the remaining month of December I am going to write
- 27 articles on Medium
- Editing two books
- Write a mini-guide and of course
- Write 5 newsletter issues for the month.
So here I am, ending the year on a high.
I have found when I set myself unusually high goals, I tend to find ways to meet them.
Yesterday I sat down and drafted five articles. I published one and scheduled the other four.
I learned it takes the same amount of time to write five articles as it takes to write one. In fact, over time, it becomes easier to write 5 articles in a day, because you have trained your brain to do so.
You are more focused, you waste less time on how to say things and your writing flows effortlessly.
Also, if you pick one topic and write 5 articles on it, you write faster and write much better articles than picking five different topics.
For example, if you make a schedule:
- Monday: 5 articles on productivity
- Wednesday: 5 articles on writing
- Friday: 5 articles on travel.
You will have 15 articles done in a week. You also will give yourself breaks and do other things in between and start again next week with different topics.
If I were successful, I would have found a way to overcome one of my biggest challenges of the year — how to write content fast and regularly. This exercise might turn out as the best learning of 2022.
I must add I wouldn’t have dared to set this goal, had I not been practicing Silva Meditation techniques which have enabled me to turn problems into projects.
I will write more about Silva techniques in my future articles. Keep an eye out for them.
