What Happens When You Fail
This week, I only published 2 out of the 5 posts that I wanted to produce. This post is a reflection on what happened.
My energy took a hit when I travelled back to Toronto from Austin last Sunday. Paired with the blogging challenge and my deadline to publish a longform essay by Wednesday, I should’ve seen this coming and cut down on my writing load for the week.
Going into this challenge, I expected not to hit a 100 posts. A 100% completion means that the challenge wasn’t hard enough. For most goals I set for myself, an 80% completion rate is the sweet spot, less than that means it was too hard. Considering I even upped the ante with the weekly essays, I’d be seriously impressed if I hit 80 blog posts. But even so I’m still busting my back to publish a post every weekday and a longform essay on Wednesday.
Until this morning, I didn’t realize that, on any given day of the week, I’m working on 3 pieces of writing simultaneously:
Reflecting, writing, and publishing the daily blog post
Writing, editing, or publishing the upcoming essay
Reading and researching for the essay after that
To operate at peak creative capacity, I need to tighten up my workflow. Right now I’m leisurely making coffee around 9:00 and I don’t start typing until 9:30. This is changing. I need to be butt in seat by 8:55 and write for 90 minutes each morning. This sets me up with momentum for the rest of my day and prevents revenge bedtime procrastination.
I also noticed that Friday has consistently been the most stressful day of the week since I started the challenge, because this is the day I publish a blog post and send out the newsletter. Backloading my work into the last day of the week isn’t ideal. This puts the most demand on me, when I have the least energy. This also makes it difficult for me to wind down for the weekend.
I’m not letting myself just solve this with brute strength or with rejigging my calendar. I’m pretty good at automating tasks with no-code, creating checklists, and building systems. But I’m approaching a point where I need someone else to execute those tasks and systems for me, so that I can do what I do best: thinking and writing. Instead of work-heavy Fridays, I want to see if I can turn them into the most reflective days of my week: a time to work on the “plumbing” for my systems, review what I did over the week, and start on the weekly plan for the upcoming week.
The outcome of missing my goals is no big deal. Instead, this past week’s failure points me towards another challenge to overcome: increasing efficiency and leverage in how I operate. If Fridays become review and reflection days and I still get my best writing done, the prize at the end excites me more than money or attention: I get time to enjoy life.
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