Journal tags: 100days

In attempt to improve my Irish language skills, which are currently not very good at all, I’ve started using Duolingo. It’s quite good fun, with the just the right level of challenge so far.

Then there’s the gamification. Plenty of encouragement and nudging with prizes and streaks. Simon reckons it pays off:

It turns out the streak mechanism was exactly what I needed. That tiny piece of effort, repeated every day over multiple years, really does add up.

He mentions it in relation to Tom’s recently-ended ten-year streak of posting a video every single week.

During The Situation, I posted a video of myself playing a tune every day for 200 days.

A few years before that I did a 100 days challenge, publishing a post with exactly 100 words every day.

In both cases, the level of difficulty was just about right. If it were too difficult, the endeavour would inevitably fail at some point. As Robin says:

But every ounce of progress I’ve ever made is because I’ve focused on much, much smaller goals. Goals so small that they don’t even look like goals. Just write this morning. Just finish that chapter. Just get one less coffee. Just go for a walk over that hill. Just don’t eat that. Just call. Just work. Just sleep. These tiny, every day details are where progress is made. The small routines.

He mentions that in relation to new year’s resolutions, which are often far too broad and sweeping in scope. That chimes with something Justin Searles wrote recently:

I’ve never accomplished anything I felt proud of by setting a goal. In fact, the surest way to ensure I don’t do something is to set a goal. When asked to set goals for myself, I’ve found that expressing the goal (as opposed to achieving it) becomes my overriding objective.

I’m also not a fan of new year’s resolutions, though I do quite like Tina’s:

Keep slowing down. (Notice how everything’s still happening? Nothing is breaking.)

Like Anna says:

Forget resolutions, let’s all do less.

And if you are going to set a goal or resolution for yourself, why would you do it in the deepest gloom of winter? I’ve written about this before:

Think about it. It’s January. The middle of winter. It’s cold outside. The days are short. The only seasonal foods available are root vegetables and brassicas. Considering this lack of sunlight and fruit, it seems inadvisable to try to also deny yourself the intake of sugar, alcohol, meat, carbohydrates or gluten. You’re playing with a stacked deck. And then when inevitably, in the depths of winter, you cave in and pour yourself a glass of wine or indulge in a piece of cake, you now have the added weight of guilt on your shoulders to carry through the neverending winter nights.

So I’m not making any new year’s resolutions. Maybe I’ll make a Summer soltice resolution. But I’m not promising anything.

For 100 days I wrote and published a blog post that was 100 words long. This was all part of the 100 Days project running at Clearleft. It was by turns fun, annoying, rewarding, and tedious.

It feels nice to have 10,000 words written by the end of it even if many of those words were written in haste, without much originality and often without much enthusiasm. There were many evenings when I was already quite tired and then remembered that I had to bash out 100 words. On those occasions, it really felt like a chore, but then, that’s the whole point of the exercise—that you do it every day regardless of how motivated or not you feel on that day.

I missed the daily deadline once. I could make the excuse that it was a really late night of carousing, but I knew in advance that I was going to be out so I could’ve written my 100 words ahead of time—I didn’t.

My exercise of choice wasn’t too arduous. Some of the other Clearlefties picked far more ambitious tasks. Alas, many of them didn’t make it to the finish line, probably because they set their own bar so high. I knew that I wanted to do something that involved writing, and I picked the 100 words constraint simply because it sounded cute.

Lots of people reading my posts thought that 100 words was the upper limit in the same way that 140 characters is the upper limit on Twitter. But for me, the whole point of the exercise was that each post needed to be 100 words exactly. Now I kind of want to write a Twitter client that only lets you post tweets that are exactly 140 characters.

Writing a post that needed to be an exact number of words long was where the challenge lay, but it was also where the reward was found. It was frustrating to have to excise words or even whole sentences just to make the word count fit, but it was also very satisfying when the final post felt like a fully-formed thing.

I realised a few weeks into the project that the piece of software I was writing in (and relying on for an accurate word count) was counting hyphenated phrases as one word. So the phrase “dog-eat-dog world” was counted as two words, not four. I worried that maybe I had already published some posts that were over 100 words long. Later on, I tried to avoid hyphenating, or else I’d add in the hyphens after I had hit the 100 word point. In any case, there may be some discrepancy in the word count between the earlier posts and the later ones.

That’s the thing about an exercise that involves writing exactly 100 words; it leads to existential questions like “what is a word anyway?”

Some of the posts made heavy use of hyperlinks. I wondered whether this was cheating. But then I decided that, given the medium I was publishing on, it would be weird not to have any hyperlinks. And the pieces still stand on their own if you don’t follow any of the links.

Most of the posts used observations from that day for their subject matter—diary-like slices of life. But occasionally I’d put down some wider thought—like days 15, 73, 81, or 98. Still, I suspect it’s the slice-of-life daily updates that will be most interesting to read back on in years to come.

Writing, editing, films, sandwich, atemporality, troll, mudshark, poetry, mandolin, falsehoods, transatlantic, wedding, secrets, phone, notifications, Dao, seamless, sparks, Dean, Isaac, Sunday, space, launch, beach, free, travel, speaking, history, inverse, reading, Spring, pow-wow, toggle, gentrification, web, bliss, Atanasoff, feast, components, CERN, intern, app, typography, books, late, Lusitania, ramen, indie, webmention, conference, conditions, spying, collaboration, Spacewar, correction, photograph, workshop, tools, trains, Greenwich, rehearsal, pride, birthday, ally, power, quiz, scale, Sophie, naming, Jeffrey, meetings, Interstellar, future, guests, practice, market, games, extended, dogs, decade, host, iPad, Cobh, tourist, Brighton, fecund, growth, tomorrow, special, comedown, solstice, weather, Codebar, animation, dConstruct, quieter, Edge, gas, exactly, done.

This is the penultimate post in my 100 days project.

I’ve had quite a few people tell me how much they’re enjoying reading my hundred word posts. I thank them. Then I check: “You know they’re exactly 100 words long, right?”

“Really?” they respond. “I didn’t realise!”

“But that’s the whole point!” I say. The clue is in the name. It’s not around 100 words—it’s exactly 100 words every day for 100 days.

That’s the real challenge: not just the writing, but the editing, rearranging, and condensing.

After all, it’s not as if I can just stop in the