Just begin again

This week, I broke my writing habit. Again. For the last two years, I have been mostly writing about productivity, when I wanted to tell stories or use this blog as a platform to learn about mathematics. Instead of working towards this intention, I turned towards a meta-analysis of creativity to avoid the work I was afraid of doing. Most of the advice I talked about in this analysis I didn't take myself. And when I restarted to write last month, and turned to the same topics I had used to procrastinate earlier, I lost my drive again. If I'm only writing stuff I don't like, in a genre I don't want to write in, why am I writing in the first place?

Measuring the quality of one's work is not easy. One definition for quality I like is that quality means meeting spec. Does your work what it was designed to do? If you are looking for a car to bring you from point A to B, a Rolls-Royce isn't of higher quality than a Toyota. Both are meeting your spec. In an engineering task, the spec is an integral part of the process. You are building a tool to perform a specific task, and you can look at how well the thing you build is performing said task. But when you're writing, it is easy to loose track of your spec. It becomes easier if you're able to answer two questions. Who is it for? And what is it for?

For a long time, I didn't care about the quality of my writing. In some sense, this is empowering. The outcome of your work is just a side effect, and rating whether your work is worth doing based on this outcome is futile. And if you never fail, you're not trying hard enough. When I was working on a post, in moments when I stared at my screen and didn't know where to go with it, it helped to take a deep breath and to accept the fact that the post will be bad. It kept me going. Usually, the post turned out better than these moments suggested.

Whenever I start writing again after a break, my goal is always to recreate my writing habit. Because even if writing daily isn't sufficient to create high-quality work, it for sure is necessary. When anxiety hits hard and I stop writing for a time, the solution is simple: Just begin again. Not thinking about quality works great to build a writing habit. But after having build this habit over and over again, it's no longer the bottleneck. So maybe it's time to take my own advice and work towards what I actually want to do.