by Chris McGinty
You may or may not have noticed that yesterday I failed to post a work of fiction to the blog. The screwy part about this is that I actually wrote two pieces of fiction yesterday. I just forgot to put either one of them up. You also may or may not have noticed that somehow I actually posted two blog posts and two works of fiction on January 5th of this year. This was something that I didn’t even notice until I was organizing the files of each individual blog post into a folder on my computer. Somehow in the same way that I wrote two pieces of fiction yesterday but forgot to post either of them; at the beginning of the year, I didn’t realize that I had already posted for the day and went out of my way to write a blog post and a piece of fiction to post for the day. This leads to why I hate streak habits and have instead been trying to get scheduled in advance.
I wasn’t even really calling this year a streak habit, but to the extent that I do want the blog to be daily, it doesn’t make sense to just pick a random day just to break the streak habit, so I kept posting everyday. When you have no lead you find yourself not in a position to take a day off and at the core of not having a streak habit you have to be able to take a day off.
If the blog had been scheduled out for a week and I had done some work on a couple of blog posts that I was working on and written a couple of short fiction and then forgot to post it wouldn’t have mattered to the overall output. Also, I’m sure there will be a day sometime in the future where I’m really just not going to have time to work on anything at all. It’s amazing that it hasn’t happened this year so far, but it almost always happens. The streak habit says that I have to write anyway because otherwise I break the habit. The scheduled blog isn’t about doing it every day as much as it’s about having a certain amount of output. That would fundamentally change how I’ve been writing since the year began, which has been more like how I wrote last year when I was doing the same thing. Somehow though, no matter how much writing I get done on an individual day, so far the output has been right about what it was supposed to be which means that even as I write this I have nothing scheduled. I’m just not sure how Seth Godin did it.
It’s possible that I might go ahead and just take one more day off from the fiction output, and then double down on basically trying to get scheduled. That has been more the goal for me this year than even making sure that I posted every day but like I said there’s no reason to actually miss a day if I’ve got the blog scheduled so it still feels like a streak habit.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who shouldn’t be wasting time writing this blurb, because he could be writing his next block post.