Publishing every day is a full body workout

When designing a workout programme for someone time-constrained, you focus on compound exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once. These exercises work the full body through a small number of movement patterns.

Publishing each day is a full-body workout for anyone looking to improve their craft and create something new.

Every day I have to:

• Write, knowing something has to be online in the next hour
• Delete, because there’s not enough time to fart around with every idea
• Access the courage needed to continue to share, even when I think I’m a worthless slug
• Refine my metaphors so that people “get” my ideas
• Refine my structure so there’s some narrative flow
• Give the piece a good title, so people are intrigued
• Run through my publishing loop, from writing in Obsidian to migrating it into Hugo to viewing it on the Internet
• Repurpose the content according to different social networks; emphasising productive takeaways in some places; personal reflections in others
• Stay disciplined on social networks, so I can do this all without developing intense misanthropy
• Engage with people who are interested in my ideas, understanding what calls to them and what they want more of

These are a lot of different skills.

I know they’re all important and in the past, I’ve devised ambitious plans to improve each individually: 20 bicep curls here, some triceps dips there, man I hate calf exercises, maybe some neck exercises…?

Instead, I now have a full-body workout: I publish each day. All muscle groups trained, by aligning them towards one outcome.

The daily nature makes a huge difference. It’s very hard for something to slip when you have to do it every time the Sun rises. The looming prospect of writing tomorrow also means you’re oriented to what you can improve tomorrow, in 20 hours time, not with a to-do item to start some research on something you’ll do In The Future.

Doing this forever sounds scary, but dedicating to it for a fixed period feels like an ideal way to make great leaps across many skills.

So if you’re a freelancer or you’re building your own startup or you just have some burning ideas you need to share, you can train your own writing, thinking, communication and marketing, all through one compound movement: publishing every day.

See you tomorrow.