Why aborting this project doesn't feel like giving up.

Yesterday a friend of mine (one of the three people who is subscribed to my newsletter) messaged me, encouraging me to keep going with my 100 day project. Because it's only fifteen more days. He even suggested a few topics I could write about. That's incredible sweet. It also misses the point. I don't think of aborting this project as giving up. Maybe the best way to explain this is by comparing it to a marathon.

The goal of a marathon is to finish the race. This is hard. If you're near your limits and still have ten kilometers to run, it's easy to be discouraged and give up. If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do is to focus on the now. Say to yourself that you are running for only 200 more meters and that it's okay to stop after than. Once you ran them, you can say to yourself again to run for 200 more meters. Repeat this until you are finished with the race. You are much more likely to finish it like this than being overwhelmed of the daunting distance still ahead. My habit tracker was similarly daunting. Instead of thinking about one post at a time and what I wanted to write about, I was anxious about all the other posts I still had to write. Aborting this project means taking time for one post at a time again. And unlike a marathon, the goal of this project wasn't to finish the race in the fist place.

The overarching goal with my blog is to find a process that serves my creative aspirations. I'm seeking a process that I can follow without thinking too much about that turns my ideas into reality. To find such a process, one has to experiment with different approaches, integrating the things that work. Before I started writing daily, my bottleneck was perfectionism. I started this project with the goal to overcome it. And I did. Maybe the best example for this is my post explaining finite state machines. I had had the idea for this post for at least seven months before writing it. I really liked the idea and wanted to take a week to write and polish the post. But I never did. So one day, I just took a crack at it and wrote it in a day. And I'm happy with the result. That's what I wanted to get from this project. I know, however, that it won't happen again.

With explaining finite state machines I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. It still took me four hours to write it. On the day I wrote it, I did nothing but sitting at my desk, working and writing. This is great to do once in a few weeks, but it's not sustainable. And however much I'll write, I know I won't write another post like this during this project. I just don't have an idea like this. That doesn't mean I don't have any ideas. Quite the contrary. I have a few ideas about programming I want to explore. I want to learn and write about the maths behind music synthesis. I'm interested in writing more fiction, and try my hand on Poetry Slam. All these topics have one thing in common. I don't know much about them and need to take some time to learn, reflect and collect ideas for specific posts. This is nothing I will do in a single day.

I started writing daily, because I was spending too much time on irrelevant details. Now I'm spending too little time on relevant details. Aborting this project doesn't mean that I will stop writing. It just means that I will take more time to think about what I want to write about.