Don’t break the chain!

For anyone who has been following this blog since I started it, it should come as no surprise to learn that I have had long periods of not posting. I was simply not motivated to write, and even though I kept jotting down ideas for posts, they just never made it onto the blog. That all changed in the end of May, when one of the Norwegian tech blogs I follow posted an entry called “Bare skriv!” or “Just write!” in English. It tells the story about Brad Isaacs, who met Jerry Seinfeld, and asked him to give a pointer or two to a young, struggling comedian.
 
According to the story, Jerry Seinfeld responded that, in order to become a better comedian, you need to write better jokes. In order to write better jokes, you need to write every day. He then told Isaacs about a method he used to motivate himself. He would get a big wall calendar that had the whole year on it, and for every day that he wrote, he got to mark the day with a big red X.
 

After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

 
I read the article, then downloaded an app called “Don’t Break The Chain!“, on which I’ve been making little checkmarks for every day that I’ve been writing. I passed the 100-day mark almost 30 days ago, and am more motivate to write than before.
 
How do I know that I have written “enough”, though? I think of it like this; if I spend at least ten minutes each day researching or actually writing blog posts, that is enough, for me. I was lucky in that, when once more starting out writing posts for this blog, I already had several ideas for posts, and some of the material that has been posted since I started my chain until today has been adapted from things I’ve written for publication elsewhere. This chain, to me, is all about re-focusing on posting, and to motivate myself to keep going with this blog. As I have also recently started studying towards my Bachelor’s degree, and a lot of what I will be studying may end up as blog posts, I will count any study-time towards that ten minutes, too.
 
An important point to me, is that this blog is not my livelyhood, it’s my knowledge base. It’s a hobby, and it’s where I put technical information that is important to me to be able to re-find easily. It’s also where I tell my friends and family to look if they ask me a question I know I’ve covered, and I know for a fact that several former coworkers have used it for ready fixes to common problems we had seen when working together.
 
Now, all that is left, is not to break the chain.