I’ll probably change how I’m doing this soon, but here’s a thread/post on the method I’ve used to write a thread/post every day for the past 95 days.

A weekly newsletter became too much pressure, and I hypothesized that a daily post might relieve that pressure. I was right.

The key thing about a daily post is that it needs to take as little time as possible. I experience great difficulty providing constraints for myself, so “I post every day” is a pretty blunt weapon to deal with that.

The second constraint I added to this daily post was my own platonic ideal of a Twitter thread, which is 5-12 tweets in length with each tweet able to stand on its own or preserve some meaning outside the context of the thread.

One of the nice things about Twitter is that I don’t really care about Twitter. It’s not mine. I don’t own it or anything I post on it. I’m just a shivering denizen of this hell’s garden labyrinth. So my perfectionism is somewhat tamed.

But I realized early that for my own internal sense of integrity, I also need to post them in a place that isn’t Twitter. So I have a microblog at little.zachphillips.blog, and with “little” right there in the title, I figured that’s also enough to tame my useless perfectionism.

While I usually write the post first thing, I’m not precious about it. There’s nothing precious about it. If I need to throw the post together in 15 minutes before bed, I will. It’s important to me that I do it simultaneously for NO GOOD REASON and EVERY REASON.

I have a bunch of little snippets and slips of ideas in Roam Research and I just grab one or whatever is top of mind and see what happens when I write the first line. Often, this is enough to break open a bunch of doors in my brain and I discover a bunch of stuff I want to write.

Using @dvargas92495’s RoamJS Twitter extension, I type the whole thread/post in Roam, watching my character counts, which keep me constrained, but they also take a lot of time wordsmithing and character-cutting. I’ll probably drop the thread crutch eventually.

Then I post.

I also post it to little.zachphillips.blog via MarsEdit, copy the links to everything back into Roam, and post a link on Facebook to my friends and family. I then add it to my newsletter which builds up through out the week.

I haven’t read through these first 95 posts but I imagine they will become fodder for more daily posts.

This practice might eclipse meditation and exercise (which I’ve also done 96 days in a row) as the best thing I’ve ever done for my mental health.

It’s done other things too.