LIAM CHAI

I finished the thirty day writing challenge a week ago. I’ve since posted an essay on my shift from vegetarian to eating meat again. I want to write some reflections on the thirty day challenge.

First, I enjoyed it. The deadline was valuable for me. I completed thirty posts, posting every day. I had one or two that were super short, but I didn’t set myself a word limit anyway.

While I enjoyed the deadline, it wasn’t enough time to go deep into topics. I don’t like posting for the sake of posting, and some days I felt that. I think a commitment like two essays per month would work better for me. I get the benefits of setting a set goal and I’ll have more time to write detailed pieces.

I have an essays page and a notes page right now on my site. I’m gonna use ‘notes’ as a place to share rough ideas and unformed thoughts. More stream of consciousness writing, less editing and less thought through.

The essays page will be for writing that I spend a lot more time on. They’ll usually also be much longer and I’ll spend a lot more time editing and refining those posts. Those are also the posts I’ll try and share more widely. I like the idea of using essay writing as a way to continue self-directing my learning. Learning is perpetual. It’s also easy to lose the compound effects of learning because of forgetfulness. By writing essays on topics that I am very interested in, I refine my learning process and I also create an archive of my learnings so that future me can revisit these pieces and very quickly re-trigger all the learnings from it.

Anyway, the key learning from the challenge is this: a daily writing habit is valuable, but publishing something every day was not as helpful. I’ll commit to delivering two essays every month instead.