A few months ago I signed up for a site called 750 Words. At the time I figured it would be an easy way to write in a distraction free writing environment and make sure I was hitting a daily writing target.
Then the subtly gamification hooked me…
The website reminds and encourages you to write every single day. At the top of the screen you see how many days you’ve written 750 words in a row as well as an X on the days of that month you’ve completed.
Once I started building the chain, I was hooked. I went as far as having to do a few entries on my phone while in the car. It took 5x longer, but I couldn’t let myself break the chain.
I’ve officially written over 75,000 words in the last 100 days. That’s the most I’ve ever written consistently. The book I wrote is less than 35,000 words and comes in around 150 pages. Half of what I wrote with the site 750Words might be garbage since I wrote in more of a freewriting style, but I know that also brought out a few ideas I never would have thought of.
First off, congratulations!
Whither now?
Did you reward yourself somehow for achieving the goal, or was the intrinsic motivation enough to sate you? I just read an interesting post about the perversion of incentives: http://www.psyfitec.com/2013/03/curiouser-and-curiouser-incentives.html I suspect many of the psychological “tricks” described in the article gave you juice to keep going on days when you didn’t feel like it.
Do you think the quality improved as time went on? Do your 10 ideas a day get better now?
Thanks. I’m on day 103 or 104 now (in a row).
I didn’t reward myself for crossing 100. My main goal is just the habit of writing 750 days without really an end in mind. The carrot/stock motivation can work, but only if there’s a deeply rooted internal desire to accomplish the task. I already want to be writing consistently I think of the dopamine my brain gets when I see that chain grow every day as something that just nudges me across the finish line every day. If I had no interest in writing, there’s no way it would motivate me to keep going with it.
As for quality, I should go back and analyze some of the earlier drafts. I know some of it is garbage and scattered, but I also know that if I didn’t take the freewriting approach, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon a few ideas while writing.
For the 10 ideas, I broke that habit about two months ago for a month. Only in the last month have I been back to writing 10 ideas a day consistently. For a while, I think I confused writing 10 thoughts vs writing 10 ideas. Altucher cleared this up during a Twitter Q&A where he said ideas can be acted upon/they have an immediate next step. So the last month I’ve been much better about ideas instead of mainly thoughts.
Those are getting better. I’m not sure if when I sit down to write 10 ideas, that I’m coming up with better ones each time, but I’ve found that I’ve recently been getting better ideas spontaneously. The habit of writing down 3 observations a day and analyzing one stand up joke a day has helped a lot with that too. Once you decide on a habit that you’re firmly going to commit to, I think it tunes your subconscious brain to look for those things.
Thanks for the detailed response, Ben! It’s interesting to see someone else’s point of view on the efficacy of these goals/mind hacks!