Daily-ish and being Flawsome

I post every day. Every. Single. Day. Sometimes people will even say to me “Daily, that is awesome!”. I accept their acknowledgement, then might say, “thank you for that, and I’d really say I’m flawsome”.

You see, I sometimes find it hard to write every day, but I embrace those flaws, those imperfections, and keep writing. I give myself permission to be “flawsome”, and through that, I have given myself some tools and methods for times when it feels challenging to be a) inspired, b) creative, c) energised, d) any other than slothful or e) a combination of all and more! So, I have some supporting ideas and methods:

• Curating. Sometimes I ask someone to create something to share on the blog, or “cultivated curation”. Other times, though, when I lack inspiration on any day, one “get out” is to read through writings of favourite thinkers and writers and simply fill that days’ post with a “rip and read”
• Short can be quick. Sometimes I post something very short with a single thought (I notice Seth Godin often does that in his daily posts. He also never uses an image, so that keeps his process even simpler)
• Lists of Ideas. Evernote is great for this, I write down my ideas in notes, then I come back to them later. Some I then discard, others may become “long reads” the type of piece I will take hours on a Sunday writing.
• Banking posts. On occasion I get on a roll and write three or four posts at a time and “bank” them, scheduling them for a few days ahead.

Today, then, something that started out as the first “curation” choice above led me to read the post carefully again before curating it here, and that led me to share my thoughts above, with the hope of sharing with you that committing to posting daily is something I do while embracing my imperfections, my “flawsome-ness”.

So, I now give you a post from “The Imperfectionist”, Oliver Burkeman, called “Daily-ish”. Hmm, what started out as an uninspired day for posting changed when I sat down to post this article. Thank you Oliver!

I once asked Jerry Seinfeld about the Seinfeld Technique, the amazing productivity secret that supposedly explains his prolific joke-writing and consequent global success. It goes like this: every day that you manage to spend at least some time on your most important creative work, you mark a big red X on your calendar. The goal is not to break the chain of Xs. 

It turned out he’d suggested it, once, to some guy in a comedy club, then largely forgotten all about it. “It’s so dumb it doesn’t even seem to be worth talking about,” he told me. “If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I’ll run every day, and mark an X on the calendar every day I run. I can’t believe this was useful information to anybody! … Really? Are there people who think ‘I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done’?” 

I was struck by this exchange, because in productivity-world, the Seinfeld Technique has come to mean “work on what matters most to you, every single day, without fail.” But to Seinfeld himself it mainly just seemed to mean that you have to put in effort, repeatedly, over the long haul. No wonder it didn’t strike him as a particularly astounding system.

In fact, I’ve come to believe that the every-single-day version of this advice (which novelists are especially guilty of dispensing) is actively terrible. You can guess why: an every-single-day rule is so rigid, so intolerant of the vagaries of life, that you’ll inevitably soon fall off the wagon. And once that’s happened, you lose all motivation to continue – so you end up doing less, in aggregate, than if you hadn’t been quite so exacting in your demands. Instead, I’m a proponent of Dan Harris’s excellent alternative, offered in the context of developing a meditation practice, but relevant to many other important goals in life: aim to do it dailyish. 

If you’re prone to making yourself miserable by holding yourself to unmeetable standards, like me, “dailyish” probably sounds a bit self-indulgent. But it’s the opposite – because it involves surrendering the thrilling fantasy of yet-to-be-achieved perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete progress, here and now. Besides, it isn’t synonymous with “just do it as often as you can”; deep down, you know that if you never average more than a day or two per week on your novel/fitness plan/meditation practice/side business/whatever, then you won’t acquire the momentum to move forward. “Dailyish” involves applying more pressure to yourself than that. But (crucial distinction coming up!) it’s a matter of pressure rather than of forcing. 

The appeal behind much productivity advice, I think, is the bewitching idea that there might be a technique or set of techniques that would force accomplishment to occur, making it automatic and inevitable. But there isn’t – and in any case the yearning for such techniques usually arises from some buried insecurity or other psychological agenda. Maybe you don’t know how to do the work in question, and you’re hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don’t really want to do it at all, but just think you ought to want to do it, so you’re using “productivity” to try to force the missing desire into being. Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement in order to justify your existence on the planet – and if the stakes are that high, clearly you can’t afford to put a foot wrong. 

“Dailyish”, on the other hand? I’m not sure I quite have the words for this, but something about “dailyish” shifts the focus away from your particular smorgasbord of psychological problems back to the thing itself – to the creation you’re seeking to bring into existence, whether that’s a piece of writing or work of art, a happy family, healthier body, meditation habit, or anything else. It’s a reminder that in some fundamental way, real productivity – provided you’re working on something worth producing to begin with – isn’t about you. It’s about what’s being produced. What matters, in the end, is what gets created, not whether the person doing the creating has an impeccable record of red Xs. Did anyone ever really think Seinfeld owes his success to a productivity technique? Clearly, he owes it to talent, perhaps also to luck – and then, on top of that, to showing up and doing the work, more days than not.

So, yes, holding yourself to a more flexible standard, such as “dailyish”, is more forgiving than the alternative. But it’s not solely a matter of being kinder to yourself. Crucially, it’s also about getting you – with all your weird hang-ups and neuroses and ulterior agendas and other psychological nonsense – out of accomplishment’s way. 

Dailyish – by The Imperfectionist