Making it a habit

Moving to the third milestone of my blogging journey. It was to establish the consistency. It was to write with a fixed frequency. Now it was the time to decide when and how I was going to write.

For this I definitely drew inspiration from James Clear's 'Atomic habits'. The author had mentioned in the book that for starting a new habit we need to make it simple. We should use the specific, actionable, and time bound methodology. We should decide the habit into simple words that our mind can understand. It should be given of frequency and a time so that it can be actionable.

I had decided to take this theory into the practice and implement it for my blogging journey. I wanted to make the goal specific which became, "I will publish one blog in each week". According to me this was an achieveable goal because writing one blog in a week was definitely not a difficult task. I had intentionally not given a word limit yet because my goal was to start writing regularly and hence I did not want to restrict myself into a complicated task which may lead me to stop writing all together. While deciding this goal I had taken into the consideration of time, patience, and energy which would be involved for it. The balance was important rather than high quality complicated output.

Moving to the next sub part of the goal about when I was going to publish my blog. This was fairly simple. I decided that the blog would be published every Saturday. Writing time should have been from Sunday to Thursday for the draft. Friday evening should be used for finalization of the blog. Saturday would be the day when the blog would be live for reading. Again this was a fairly simple task on to deciding when should the blog be published.

Next step was not required yet I felt it would be helpful for refining my task further. I decided that time at which I should publish my blog. I decided the evening time to be appropriate for releasing the blog. I decided that the time for my block to go live would be 6:00 p.m.

Now my SMART goal statement became specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time bound. My goal statement was "every week at 6 o'clock on Saturday I will publish my blog". My goal statement was very convincing to me and I had decided to act on it.

With bringing little discipline for my dream and vision, I felt that the journey had become purposeful. The next step for my journey was to walk on the path that I had created myself. What I knew is that I should honour my goal and the path that I had selected. I should make every effort to make my dream into a success story.

With that motivation I started writing regularly. Initial few weeks were difficult where either I was unable to find an appropriate subject for the blog or felt that the blog was not of high quality. Despite of my feelings I had still gone ahead and published the blogs which did not impress me. For me it was a learning journey and I had decided to go easy with it.

Surprisingly within a couple of weeks I was able to find the momentum. Wherever I would go I would find something fascinating to write about in my blogs. This is how just bringing in little disciplined help me to become better as a creative writer.