Removing Friction for a Better Writing Habit

To make sure you can do a habit every day, we must make it as simple as possible to do it. We must define a minimal version, also called a “tiny habit”, to make sure we don’t have an excuse not to do it any day. We must also remove any friction we can otherwise find. Prepare the environment, get the tools ready, and link the habit to something else we do already regularly.

I know all that and yet I failed miserably at putting a decent online publishing habit in place.

This, is a new attempt. The idea goes as follows: I’ve been writing into a journal on almost a daily basis for almost seven years now, with a break of only a handful of months at one point. I arrived at a stage where I wrote those entries using Vim in the Terminal. Those might not be the most common tools to write in for most, but they help me to write without distraction and with speed. I don’t need to open a browser, for example, or Word or another text editor that has way too many things that could distract me from the one thing I want to do: write.

It’s a barebones environment to write and since I save the files into a folder that is synced to a cloud I don’t have to panic much about loosing my entries and can write while I’m offline or online.

Now these blog posts are written in Vim and then published by a quick push to the GitHub repository which hosts the Jekyll-based blog via GitHub Pages on which you can read my words.

Reducing friction so that I can write and especially publish such daily thoughts as quickly as I can write and save my daily journal entries.