Your Accountability Partner – free tool
You need a reminder that will make you sit down and start writing.
Nothing else is working for you, so maybe it’s time to try something new?
Your Writing Reminder
Why should you go one day without writing?
Every time you formulate a resolution, the excitement is short-term and short-lived. Take, for example, New Year’s resolution. There’s no need to tell you how many of those resolutions remain wishful thinking.
For the last months, we’ve tested a simple activity which seemed to have a positive effect on the motivation of our focus-group of writers. I was one of them because I struggle with the same tendency to procrastinate and postpone indefinitely the moments when I should be writing.
These are the conclusions of our little experiment (we had writers that use Asengana Writing platform and writers that don’t):
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There is really no decent excuse to not write every day. No matter what happens in a day, there’s a 99% chance that you can allocate 30 minutes to an hour to writing if you just take a second to move from thought to action.
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There isn’t a universal motivational message. Each writer has unique triggers to action.
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Any external reminder, even the simple reading of an article about writing or a friend asking “What have you written lately?” can be the right trigger to start writing.
It’s a pact you make with yourself. There isn’t any efficient external help unless you accept you need one.
We looked for goal settings methods and found that PACT – Purposeful / Actionable / Continuous / Trackable – was a good fit:
Purpose
We like to think writing is a long-life purpose. Something you care about. It’s hard to stick with something if you don’t care. A goal aligned with your passion is a good motivator.
Action
Writing is an action. The external trigger should shift your mindset from a future outcome (I should write sometimes soon) to a present output (I should be writing right now!).
Continuous
Writing is a simple decision and a repeatable one. Getting to the end of your story is an incremental process. It’s more about the journey than about the destination.
Trackable
Tracking is not just about measuring how many words you write. It’s about a question with simple answers: yes or no. Answer yes to this question: Did you write anything today?
Our proposed solution, easy to implement for us and accessible by any writer (not only the members of the Asengana Community) was an email reminder. Preferences were for daily, weekly, or monthly. Personally, I prefer daily. I know it feels like spam, but for me it works because I feel guilty. It creates pressure, is making me anxious and I actually open my manuscript page or at least add details to a character or location.
If you’re interested, we made it easy. You have 3 options below for daily, weekly, and monthly. The email is just a few words and it will change based on your feedback. Based on our user testing, the message was not that important. The subject line and the fact that seeing it in the list of emails made you think about writing was.
Subscribe and unsubscribe any time. We would love to hear your feedback, to know if it is useful or not for you.