The Tricks I Use To Develop A Writing Habit
When I re-committed to writing back in July of 2019 I started doing so in MultiMarkdown Composer. I learned about the tool from Brett Terpstra at MacStock and having learned that my brain works in many similar ways to Brett’s, I figured it was worth a try.
I downloaded MMD Composer, started typing, tweaked some preferences, and then bought the upgrade. I then proceeded to use it as my primary writing tool for the next six months and loved it.
Towards the end of 2019, I found myself in a hole where I went almost three weeks without publishing any new writing. The written word is my medium of choice when it comes to sharing my ideas. Yes, I can do podcasts and love them. Yes, I can do videos and enjoy them. But if you make me choose between those three, I will always come back to writing. To see a three-week gap in releasing my words to the world was hard.
In the case of podcasting, I have my cohost, Mike, to keep me chained to a schedule. I also have a huge bank of subscribers expecting new episodes of Bookworm every two weeks. That external pressure is all I need to keep me reading books daily and recording bi-weekly.
Videos are a little different. I generally release videos in the form of courses, namely one course at the moment. When I commit to a new video course I don’t have any real deadline that others expect of me. I could release one a year or less and it wouldn’t matter.
But I play a trick on myself by telling the world my plans. I microblog about it and make my expected timeframe public. And that means everyone knows when to look for the course. It also means I have to keep my word. Again, the external pressure builds and I follow through.
Writing, again, is different. It becomes overkill to announce my article topics weeks in advance. Those announcements would come too frequent for the average person to keep track, which means it would be easy to skip the release of an article or newsletter. This is how I came to skipping three weeks' worth of publishing.
There is another trick that works on me: don’t break the chain. Once I have a streak created for two days, I will do my best not to create a gap. And since the first two days of any new commitment deliver new and shiny motivation, those two days become the easy part.
In the case of writing, it’s not enough for me to say that I did or did not write on a given day. I will forever write a single sentence and then set it aside. If you have ever written an article or emails, you know that writing a single sentence every day does not achieve grand writing goals.
Instead, there needs to be a threshold at which the true/false of daily success is attributed. And if you are a writer, you know that the standard measure by which you are judged is in the daily word count.
Let’s put this all together. I need a way to keep a chain together. It’s too much to make that chain public. And there needs to be a way to determine whether the day is counted towards the chain or not.
That leaves me with a single feature required of my writing workflow: a daily writing goal.
Yes. Yes. I know. This is normal and nothing new. But this left me with a problem. There isn’t an automated way of tracking how many days I have written my threshold of words in MultiMarkdown Composer. At least, not without doing some fancy script work. And that means I need to explore other tools.
Generally speaking, whenever I discover the need for a new tool, my gut reaction is to go to SetApp and search for it. But in this case, I already knew the answer before I had SetApp open: Ulysses. Ulysses is one of those tools that single-handedly makes a SetApp subscription worth it.
I have tried Ulysses in the past and left it because I preferred to keep all my text editing in one place. Namely, I wrote everything in the command line using vim. But over time, I had to get away from that. I wanted good previewing tools and some of the niceties that come with applications made for writing prose.
When I made the shift to MultiMarkdown Composer I had taken the first step back into the realm of dedicated writing tools. But now that my requirements have changed, I needed to move. And since I had a history with Ulysses and knew it could handle the task, I decided to download it once more and see how it goes.
Ulysses works on a single condition: it needs to show me my daily word goal achievement chain.
Many people know that you can set a goal for a sheet in Ulysses. But you can also set a daily goal for a group that repeats daily. Here’s a look at my current stats. Note that I tend to take the weekend off of writing. Thus, the two-day gap in stats.
To set this up, right-click on the group, select “Goal…”, set it to “Every Day”, and then set the number of words you want for the goal. It’s that simple.
I should also note that this is only the technical, software component of this daily habit. Yes, it is easy to configure the settings, click the buttons, and visualize the work that has been completed. I'll be bold enough to suggest that this is what most folks get excited about and love to learn.
However, the setting up of the goal will always be the easy portion of the project. Once in place, it is now up to us to set aside the time to actually write the words that convert the gray rings into green rings.
In my case, I have a goal of 500 words per day, not including the weekend. That equates to a minimum of 2,500 words a week. If I have any hope of completing that goal each day and week, I will be required to devote time each day to the task. And although I’m a fast typist (roughly 110 WPM), there is a lot of time spent fighting mental distractions and contemplating my word choice. So I know I will need around 30 to 45 minutes to complete this goal each day.
Ulysses helps me see the goal, but it is up to me to achieve the goal. And the best time for me to do that is immediately when I get to my office each morning. Any other time and I will put it off or skip it altogether.
I am always trying to learn the nuances and tricks behind these habits. So I am always curious about what others do to achieve these writing goals. If you’re a writer or someone who has writing goals, what tricks do you use?
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The GTD Weekly Review is likely one of the most talked about and most resisted aspects of following the GTD methodology. And it makes sense. It takes time to do it right and it requires thinking at a level that is less than enjoyable.
And that means we need to remove as much resistance to the process as possible. Otherwise, if you have an instant gratification mind like mine, you will find every excuse possible to doing the Weekly Review and doing it well.
Usually, when we discuss the Steven Pressfield concept of resistance we mention small obstacles that prevent us from doing large tasks. We talk about the need to set out clothes to prepare for a run in the morning. Or we find little tricks to keep us engaged in a daily habit of writing.
If you take the idea of eliminating small obstacles to the commitment of a Weekly Review, we can find ways to streamline the review and use it as a tool for setting up our commitments for the week ahead. At least, that’s the idea. We all fall off the horse when learning, myself included. The goal is to fall off less as time goes on.
The Mind Sweep
The core of the Weekly Review is to bring the whole GTD system up-to-date. And that means you need to start by capturing all the loose ends. In most cases, that translates to the mind sweep. But saying you need to do a mind sweep only works if you know how to do that.
I do not have the wherewithal to sit down and write out everything on my mind. I will always forget things and they will haunt me later. And because I know I will forget things, I have zero motivation to start the task of a mind sweep in the first place. What’s the point if it won’t be complete anyway?
So I need a little help here and the one thing I found to help is reading the Incompletion Trigger List. By going through this list, I have found my mind sweeps more complete and more effective. I can’t say they are 100%, but they feel close enough that the mind sweep does happen.
Sidenote: If you want a markdown version of this list to copy into the tool of your choice, I have it translated here. And if you have kids, it is also helpful to look through this list for moms and dads.
Emptying Inboxes
It is paramount that during a Weekly Review, you have empty inboxes. This is especially true when you have completed the mind sweep as you have very likely generated more than a few items that need clarification and placed throughout your system. But it’s not always fun to do the thinking required to accomplish this task.
The holy grail of emptying inboxes would be to capture the idea and have the decision-making about the item done for you. In most cases, this is far from possible and likely never will be. We are a long way from having “Resolve family dispute” turned into a project and the next action assigned to it without taking the time to think through the situation.
But there are scenarios when this is possible. And two tools help me out here. One is Hazel. The other is the OmniFocus Auto-Parser.
I love Hazel. (And not because my youngest daughter’s name is Hazel.) Hazel can move files around your Mac and run scripts based on conditions your filesystem meets. For example, if you set up an “inbox” directory on your Mac, Hazel can watch that folder. If Hazel is looking for “.dmg” files in your inbox and one shows up, it can move it to a folder called “disk images.”
This is the tip of the iceberg with Hazel. And the best place I’ve found to learn more about it and how to use it is through MacSparky’s Field Guide. David has two and a half hours of video here showing how to get the most out of Hazel. It’s well worth the $29.
Note: This article contains affiliate links. That means that if you click one of these links and subsequently make a purchase, I will earn a commission. You pay nothing extra; any commission I earn comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that I only recommend tools that I find genuinely helpful and useful. I ask that if don’t feel the same way about them, please do not spend any money on these products.
The Auto-Parser is a tool I wrote that will process items in your OmniFocus inbox given a specific syntax. I have found this great for automating bug reports or replicating tasks from other systems in OmniFocus. You only need to set up the Auto-Parser, configure IFTTT or Zapier to email into OmniFocus with the syntax, and the automation will give those tasks the appropriate metadata.
Task And Project Titles
This is often overlooked. When you do a Weekly Review you need to write out the task or project titles that you committed to completing. That means looking at every task that remains in your inboxes and every project in the system and ensuring proper placement and next actions assigned to each one.
And every GTD system I have seen has some set rules for naming things. Task titles need a clear enough definition that you know what to do without thinking. Project names should convey their “done” state somehow.
And the easiest way to type these out is with text expansion via TextExpander. As an example here are some of the snippets I use every week to speed up this process:
of.wf = “Waiting for “
of.em = “Email (Name Fill-in) re: “
of.li = “Look into “
of.pfm = “Plan for meeting re: “
of.resp = “Waiting for response re: “
These may seem minor, but most of the time these little snippets speed up the processing time required when reviewing my projects and calendars.
Keeping Tools Up To Date
I find it easy to forget that the purpose of the Weekly Review is to ensure my system is up-to-date and that by “system” it can mean more than my GTD system. The Weekly Review is also a great time to refresh your Mac and to update any tools connected to each other.
The easy ones are to run a CleanMyMac scan and check for duplicate files in Gemini. Doing both of these weekly helps keep my Mac healthy and my mind at ease.
At the same time, I have found that keeping TextExpander up-to-date has compounding benefits as well. Most people have noticed that a handful of iOS apps allow you to import TextExpander snippets into their databases. And that means you don’t need to use the third-party keyboard for these snippets to work.
The three that I use with this feature are Drafts, OmniFocus, and Fantastical. It was a common occurrence for me to type a snippet in one of these apps and have it fail or do nothing. That would remind me that I needed to update the snippets in the iOS app before those snippets would work. It wasn’t a huge problem but it was a frustration nonetheless.
During my Weekly Review, I now make it a point to go into these three apps and update the snippet libraries.
At the same time, TextExpander suggests new snippets and stores those in a folder called Suggested Snippets. Each week, I go through this list and treat it as a dedicated inbox for creating new TextExpander snippets.
Blocking Distractions
This should have been at the top. Distractions are a huge threat when doing a Weekly Review. Think about how many different locations you need to go digitally and how many ideas you are intentionally drumming up. Now think about how easy it is to pop open a web browser and type that search term. I speculate that this is what leads many folks to expand the amount of time required to complete the Weekly Review.
In most cases, my Weekly Review takes about an hour, sometimes 45 minutes. This is despite the fact that most report two hours as the required timeframe. For me, I know that I love to jump into the new and shiny as soon as it comes to mind. That’s where Freedom comes in.
I use Freedom to block the internet. When I first debated doing this, I had excuses galore. So much of my processing and data entry relies on information stored on the internet. But when you stop and think about it, the need for a connection doesn’t apply.
My phone is staying up-to-date in the background. So updating snippets and such is fine. All the required data is on the device itself. The same goes for my Mac. Everything I need is on the Mac and does not need the connection for syncing until the whole process is done.
So blocking the internet is perfectly fine. Though, that doesn’t mean I don’t feel nervous every time I click “Start Session.” I still hesitate before clicking. But I also know that as soon as I commit to starting a Freedom session, I am also committing to the Weekly Review.
What did I miss? What tools do you use to keep your Weekly Review on the rails?
Joe Buhligan analog mind in a digital world
A couple of months ago I mentioned my use of Ulysses along with a few other tricks to develop a writing habit. And that has worked great… for a time. That is, it worked until I saw this tweet by Brett Terpstra.
I heard you say "I wish there was a faster way to embed a song in my HTML/Markdown documents." Lucky you, it's one of SearchLink's less useful features. pic.twitter.com/cCvaxYLZ3V
— Brett Terpstra is a big fan of your recent work (@ttscoff) February 12, 2020
SearchLink is one of Brett’s projects that I discovered about six months ago. I don’t remember what it was that helped me find it, but I remember thinking it was exactly what ADHD brains need. A tool that finds the link I want without needing to go to a browser to get it. Any time a browser is needed, focus decides it’s break time.
So I put SearchLink on a list of tools to install and explore.
Brett’s tweet reminded me of the tool. But I was on an accidental focus break when I discovered it. I was supposed to be writing at the time, but instead, I was cruising through Twitter. And I was cruising through Twitter while looking or a specific tweet I needed to link.
That’s when I moved my task of exploring SearchLink up to an active task for the week.
But then this happened:
Just in time for @JoeBuhlig to get on board. https://t.co/lajcS6m9df
— Brett Terpstra is a big fan of your recent work (@ttscoff) February 13, 2020
That night my wife was going out with a few friends. And the next thing I knew I was installing the SearchLink services and setting up my hotkeys.
The last two weeks have been a bit of a mess for my writing workflow. And that’s because Ulysses thinks it would be cool to change the markdown formatting on the fly instead of rendering it at the end. And that means I can’t see the links created without clicking into each one.
Could I work around this and get used to it? Absolutely. Do I want to? Absolutely not.
So I ditched Ulysses… again. It seems like every time I think I have Ulysses figured out, I end up leaving it a month or two later. I should learn from my own history. But who does that these days?
With Ulysses gone, I immediately went back to using MultiMarkdown Composer. It was the core of my writing workflow previously, so I went back to it. But in doing so, I lost some of the features in Ulysses that I was using.
The easy one is the structure. I was tagging my articles by the type of article and then viewing those with filters in Ulysses. The simple answer to this is to recreate the folder structure in my iCloud Drive and not worry about it. Yes, I lose the filtering, but with simple folders in place of tags, I get the same effect.
The hard one is the goal-based writing that I do. I have a set number of words I like to produce for different types of articles or posts. And Ulysses does an excellent job of showing a visual for when you have reached that goal. But there’s a bit of a danger in this as well. By having the visual, there is a tendency to stop writing and wrap up when you achieve the goal. I suppose this is fine if you’re ok with all your articles being close to the exact same length. But there is something about it that seems fake to me.
There is no concept of goals in MultiMarkdown Composer. I can still see the word count in the info panel at the bottom of the screen. And since I know what my goal is, it only takes a glance at the bottom of the screen to know if my goal is met or not. But it is also out of my view and not as easy to see while I am writing, which means I have a tendency to keep going after meeting the goal.
I also lose the ability to track my writing goal streak. In other words, how many days in a row have I hit my goal? At this point, this is unnecessary. After a couple of weeks, I wasn’t checking the streak anyway. I had a daily habit in place. That’s all that mattered.
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Joe Buhlig
an analog mind in a digital world
In the last month, I have expanded a little over 1,000 snippets in TextExpander. And given the complexity of those snippets, it has saved me over two hours worth of typing in that same period. And although that sounds impressive, I’m guessing the real number is closer to double that number. The snippets I’m using often save me from switching back and forth between applications or hunting down information.
So it’s no secret that I look for ways to use TextExpander as much as I can. The more tools I can integrate with it, the better. And that’s why I was thrilled to discover a bunch of apps that have an integration with TextExpander. It means I don’t have to use the third-party keyboard to use my snippets on iOS.
Note: This article contains affiliate links. That means that if you click one of these links and subsequently make a purchase, I will earn a commission. You pay nothing extra; any commission I earn comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that I only recommend tools that I find genuinely helpful and useful. I ask that if don’t feel the same way about them, please do not spend any money on these products.
Drafts
Drafts is my home base. So it has to be at the top of the list. You can use this in the settings for Drafts. Scroll down and under Extensions you’ll find TextExpander. From there you can enable TextExpander and refresh the snippets regularly (more on that later).
OmniFocus
I can’t make this list without mentioning OmniFocus. I have a snippet group in TextExpander dedicated to OmniFocus to make it quicker to enter task titles and dates. To set this up, go to the settings within OmniFocus and scroll down to TextExpander. Again, you can enable the integration and refresh the snippets from the same place.
Fantastical
In recent weeks I find myself using BusyCal on both my Mac and iPhone. But I have used Fantastical regularly over the years. And one of the features I have sorely missed on my phone is this TextExpander integration. To set it up in Fantastical, go to the settings, scroll down near the bottom under Advanced and you’ll see the setting for updating TextExpander snippets.
Ulysses
I thought I had something great in Ulysses. But I recently switched my writing flow due to SearchLink. And in this case, it has been a huge ordeal since I rarely do any writing on my iPhone. Regardless, to use native TextExpander snippets in Ulysses, open a note and tap the “aA” icon at the top. Then go to Editing and at the bottom you’ll see an option to Enable TextExpander and updating the snippets.
Bear
I haven’t used Bear in a long time, but I know it’s popular for folks leaving Apple Notes or Evernote. So, good news! You can use TextExpander with it! Go to Bear’s settings and then tap on General. Right near the bottom you’ll see the settings for enabling TextExpander snippets.
Day One
I tried Day One for 3.1 seconds a few years ago. It didn’t make sense to me. But I know people love it. I’m more of a pen and paper fan when it comes to journaling. But if you want to use TextExpander with it, open up Day One’s settings, scroll down to Advanced, and about half-way down you’ll see the settings for turning on and updating TextExpander.
OmniOutliner
The OmniGroup is great about building in integrations in their apps. And OmniOutliner is no exception. I haven’t used it a ton in the past, but I am looking at it more and more. To set up TextExpander in it, go to the settings and scroll down to TextExpander. It’s similar to OmniFocus that way. Go figure.
Editorial
In the last month or so, Editorial has seen some update love from the developer. It used to be a go-to app for many writers and developers writing scripts. So I’m interested to see what comes of it in future months. To use TextExpander with it, go to Editorial’s settings, scroll down to Snippets and Abbreviations, and then Enable TE Snippets.
One thing to keep in mind, these will quickly become outdated if you are actively updating and adding TextExpander snippets. This is something I do regularly. So I have to make sure I keep these refreshed. For that, I add each of these apps to my Weekly Review as a task to refresh snippets. This way, I know these are always almost-up-to-date.
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Joe Buhlig
an analog mind in a digital world
