Daily blogging, barely shipping

It's been a month since I began my daily blogging experiment. It's been hard, even when not spending too much time writing. But it was easier than I thought.

Once you embrace such a frequent habit, there will be times in which you don't enjoy it as much as you thought. Saying to yourself, Let's ship it and move on to the next one is a way to keep going.

Unless you can invest quality time every single day in your habit—writing, in the case of daily blogging—you'll have to get by with shorter pieces than you'd like and low(er) quality posts than you'd get if you had all the time in the world. If you're human, it's likely to find days in which you won't have the right mindset, energies, or time. Shipping anything is the goal in those cases. But it doesn't need to be.

To avoid the feeling of cheating when you're not at one hundred percent, you can maintain a queue of ideas and finished drafts ready to be published when you're away on vacation, sick in bed, or with too much on your plate. (If your habit is writing daily, not publishing, there's nowhere to hide. You either write or not. But you can still cheat by writing some nonsense.)

The gist is to embrace the identity of a craftsman who shows up daily. In the case of writing, that craft is discovering what you think, pondering your thoughts, and entertaining and inspiring others to learn, reflect, and change in positive ways.

Remember that it doesn't need to be writing and that each commitment adds up to the potential stress you will accrue when you're unable to fulfill your promise. But it's worth it.

What's your commitment?