I’m now about two weeks into my new routine of writing every morning. In that time, I’ve managed to (finally!) publish a book review I had been planning to tackle (and had abortively started more than once) for months; I have written almost as many words as I have the whole rest of the year; and I published one post that apparently struck a nerve. One thing that has become obvious is that my initial surmise was correct: the early morning is the best time for me to be writing, and I get a lot of mileage out of taking anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to get at it.

This little post is a reflection not just on that upside, though, but on rolling with the punches. It’s now 7:30pm, and I didn’t write at all this morning… because I didn’t sleep much last night. My little sister and her husband are in town with their 7-year-old and 3-week-old… and the 3-week-old, one room over from us, slept about the way 3-week-old babies tend to. Add in a 3:45am call from my wife and kids who had to evacuate the airport for a fire alarm where they were trying to fly home from visiting family, and the need then to drive up to the airport to get them, and my normal writing block simply didn’t exist. So here I am some 13 hours later, trying to just write a little bit today anyway, because even after just these couple weeks I have come to value getting out some words every day. After I finish this little post, I’ll see if I can knock out another section of the New Rustacean episode I’m drafting for early January, too.

“Productivity” often looks like this: just a bit at a time, day after day; and doing a little even when you don’t really feel like it, just so you keep some forward motion going. Here’s to a lot of keeping-up-that-momentum in the year ahead.