WRITING

100 Days of Writing: Day 90 — Productivity Buddies

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

On Feb 1st, 2022, I embarked on a 100-days writing challenge, where I aimed to write one story per day on Medium.

I’ve decided to do a check-in every 10 days. The last one was here. And today, I will give you my progress on day 90.

Almost there

This is article number 90 and I’m writing this on the 90th day of the challenge, which means I’m on track.

I’m just 10 articles shy of accomplishing the challenge, which is cool. It’s totally within my grasp now!

Buddy Up

These past 10 days, I started a new series of articles on productivity buddies.

And I just released the first 2 parts:

• Buddy Up: Part 1 — How to Get Productive With a Supportive Friend
• Buddy Up: Part 2–7 Criteria to Get Yourself an Awesome Productivity Buddy

Productivity buddies are a flavor of accountability buddies that I’ve been practicing since 2017. The idea is to work on your productivity with a supportive friend by organizing regular meetings where you talk about your respective goals and projects.

Half of the meeting is dedicated to you and the other half is dedicated to your partner.

Productivity Buddies

Also related to the “Buddy Up” series, I started to create a group of productivity enthusiasts.

We are currently 4 people, and we do a “productivity workout” session each week. It’s a kind of co-working event where each one of us works separately on their productivity system or tasks that we’ve been procrastinating on.

So far, I find it helpful to get the motivation flowing on our most dreaded tasks.

Answering Quora questions as article ideas

Lately, I realized you can find great article ideas by browsing unanswered questions on Quora.

I started with the question: ”What should I do if I get told what to do at work while everyone else goofs off?”.

This allowed me to create a nice article. I haven’t published it yet, but it’s on my backlog of articles to publish.

The Headline Studio

Last but not least, I found a great tool lately to help me tweak my titles.

As you might remember, I take great care to craft compelling titles for my articles. My rule of thumb is to write at least 10 title variations for each of my upcoming articles.

Unfortunately, sometimes I convince myself that I crafted a great title, while I don’t find it that great a couple of days later.

Now, what if there was an automated tool that could tell you if your title is compelling or not?

Enter Headline Studio, a tool that gives you a mark from 1 to 100 for the attractiveness of your title.

I love this tool. It is based on things like sentiment analysis and grammatical structure. This tool is a freemium application, but I still rely on the free tier right now.

My statistics

Now let’s see my statistics.

First, the story stats:

Since the last check-in, my views count changed from 3440 to 3234, a 6% decrease. So again, disappointing results.

As you can see, there was not any meaningful spike in traffic this time, except for my latest article, which bears a sexy name: Becoming Batman (I told you titles are important!).

Now let’s see the audience stats:

I gained 23 followers and 2 new email subscribers. So the number of followers did not improve much, but it’s nice to have 2 new email subscribers!

My secret sauce

As usual, let’s check in on the habits I had in mind while starting this challenge:

Developing consistency and motivation

• I will develop a habit of writing for one hour each morning when I wake up. Yes, I’m still doing it. Still writing the rough draft of my articles in the evening and editing in the morning.
• I will do calls with my accountability partner to help me stay focused on my goals. Once again, a bit too busy with the article writing part to think about this one (which is a pity since I just started my “Buddy Up” series on the subject!).
• I will actively participate in various writers’ communities — currently, I’m part of the Write Useful Books and ILLUMINATION slack workspaces. Not doing it for these 2 ones. But it was fun to start my own productivity community!
• Other than that, I’m still working on a tight schedule to make sure I produce one quality article per day. So there are many things that I don’t do perfectly. Sometimes I don’t do little things like creating a tweet for a new article. I’ll catch up on those later.

Finding inspiration

• I will read medium articles and follow interesting writers that I enjoy. I didn’t read many Medium articles lately. But one article comes to mind from Tim Denning, who said the number one thing unsuccessful writers lack in their article is to evoke emotions. I think he’s right. And it’s something I need to work on.
• I will read a book each day for at least 30 minutes. Still reading the book The art of impossible by Steven Kotler. The part I’m reading right now is fascinating as it speaks about the latest advances in the psychological roots of the flow state. So I read it very slowly.
• I will do daily walks in nature. This is something I need to do more. I had a lot of pressure on my work lately, which explains I didn’t do it as much as I liked. But this is an essential point I must not omit.
• Other than that, lately, I used structured procrastination to great effect to help me generate ideas. I’ll write an article on it.

Avoiding burnout

• I will do meditation or take a nap each morning after publishing my daily article. Yes, naps and the Body Scan Relaxation Technique are essential. Coming up: an article on my experience with naps.
• I will do vigorous exercise during my walks in nature. Like I said in the previous section I need to catch up on this.
• I will write articles in advance. Right now, I don’t have fully-fledged articles in advance for my challenge. But I do have “half-baked” articles on my incubation list that can become articles with a little effort.
• Other than that, I’m sleeping really late these times. I’ll try to fix that.

Ensuring I write quality articles

• I will never publish an article the same day I wrote the first draft so that I can edit it properly. Yes, doing it!
• I will use Grammarly to spot my grammar mistakes. Still using it! Still using the basic Grammarly option.
• I will practice writing exercises, such as studying my favorite authors and reusing their writing plans. What I did lately was rewrite part of an article from Abena Talks just before writing a new article, as a warming up exercise. She’s a very prolific author. And I’ve been curious about her articles. I think it’s a great technique. I’ll probably do it with other authors too!
• Other than that, I now consider Obsidian a critical tool for my creative process. I’m glad I already know how to create a Zettlekasten, although I still have room to improve :)

The 10 posts I wrote since the last check-in

Lastly, here’s the list of stories I wrote since the last check-in in case you’ve missed them:

81. 20 good reasons to get organized (to be published) 82. 3 books on participative leadership that will blow your mind (to be published) 83. Why I get told what to do while everybody else goofs off? (to be published) 84. The Cliffhanger Technique: How to Be Crazy Eager to Start Your Work 85. Buddy Up: Part 1 — How to Get Productive With a Supportive Friend 86. The joy of flow: turning your unpleasant task into a mouth-watering strawberry cocktail (to be published) 87. Buddy Up: Part 2–7 Criteria to Get Yourself an Awesome Productivity Buddy 88. Becoming Batman: Starting Your Workday as an Epic Superhero 89. Smart conditioning: how to prime your success with a fetish object (to be published) 90. (this article)

In the last 10 days, I also published these articles from my backlog:

• The Focus Rudder: Fine-Tuning Your Focus at Work With the Yerkes-Dodson Law
• 5 Ways to Boost Your Productivity With the Observer Effect

And here are other articles from before that I still need to publish:

• Friday Evening Hangover — How to Get Productive When You Don’t Feel Like It?
• Break Free From Procrastination by Washing Your Hands
• Overcoming a Creativity Block With the Malkovich Principle
• Deep Insights: 7 Books That Caused a Mini-Revolution in My Life
• Avoiding Disastrous Personal Crises with a Risk Register
• Solitude + Goal = Big Magic
• Breakthrough Pauses: Yes, There is a Recipe to Produce Genius Ideas
• Burning the ships … or not!
• Unshakable Weekly Reviews: power-up your workweek with a touch of social interaction
• The Crash Test Principle: How to Be on Time Every Time

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I hope you enjoyed this article. As you can see, I’m very passionate about this productivity buddy thing. And I found 2 marvelous tools in the last 10 days: the Headline Studio and unanswered questions on Quora as a tool for inspiration. I hope this inspires you on your writing journey.

On February 1st, 2022, I embarked on a 100 days writing challenge. This is post number 90.