I want to be a writer

October 26, 2024

Ok, well not exactly. Perhaps it’s that I want to be someone who is known for their writing. Though that doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head either. Maybe it’s that I want to share my thoughts and professional work to publicly demonstrate my experience and push my career (and the web) further. Yeah, that one sounds pretty good. It’s on-brand, too: I know myself and I need to understand my goal if I want a habit to stick.

There’s another, more immediate priority here too: The more time I spend in software development, the more the job becomes about writing English than it does about writing code. I should practice that part outside of my day job. I’ve also found myself regularly working in this web content space – leading the engineering team as we first built the current Mozilla Foundation site, then improving the performance of the Policygenius content site, and now as the technical owner of the Carta marketing site – so it makes a lot of sense to have a body of work that’s my own to experiment with.

One of the books I read this year was Atomic Habits (which put words to a lot of the patterns I’ve recognized in the past and is worth a read), so naturally I’m thinking about how to make writing a habit that will stick. I’m on a 660 day Duolingo streak and the fact that I can just spend a few minutes doing it every day really helps. I want writing to be the same. Two possible approaches come to mind:

• Write and post at least 100 words every day. This hits the ease but not the habit stacking
• Tie this to my subway commute (which I do 3 days/week). This is a pretty reasonable habit to stack it with, though I worry it’s not consistent enough to make writing into a habit that takes hold.

I think I’ll split the difference and aim to publish at least 100 words 5 days a week. This accounts for the busiest of days where I just can’t find the time, while making it a mostly-daily habit. I’ll add a field to my nightly habit-tracking note (which gets scraped into my yearly goal tracking). And of course, like any work, I’ll need to reevaluate and adjust course based on what I find works.