My Medium Plans for May

And quite possibly the remainder of the year.

It’s been over a week since I last published a piece of writing on Medium despite recent claims that my motivation levels had returned to normal.

April 30th was the last time I sat down in front of my laptop to write an article and since then my activity on Medium has been minimal.

It’s not that I’ve lost interest in the platform or in the writing process, in fact, it’s quite the opposite and my drive is as strong as ever.

As the month of April drew to a close and we were all gearing up to receive our Medium Partner Program rewards for the weeks that had passed, it suddenly occurred to me that since the beginning of the year my earnings had been pretty consistent from month to month.

Now, they say the key to success is consistency, which is true but only if you’re seeing positive results and more importantly positive growth, which, unfortunately, I am not.

Perhaps a better way to put it would be my progress has plateaued.

As you strive to achieve your goals, whatever they may be, there will come a time when your progress and growth levels off.

A time when you are going neither up nor down and you remain stagnant in your pursuit.

It happens to everyone at one time or another and when you find yourself at this frustrating fork in the road you have two options — possibly three if you count giving up as an option, which I don’t.

You can either;

• Continue doing what you’ve been doing, “all the right things”, and hope to finally gain traction again and continue on your journey — which is doubtful.

Or

• You can assess your current situation, re-evaluate your plan of attack and then take action to push yourself onwards and take things to the next level.

Now, I’m sure you don’t need telling which is the correct choice to make — assuming you are serious about achieving your goals of course.

Seeing as my goals are to become a better writer and one day make a living off of the articles which I create and given the fact that doing what I was doing was unlikely to get me anywhere close to achieving those goals, I decided that it was time to make adjustments in how I planned to keep on moving forward.

So, as of May 1st, I put a new plan of attack into action.

A simple plan, which didn’t take a great deal of time to create and it is as follows;

• Get better at writing!

That’s it.

For months I had been saying to myself that once I had made ‘X’ amount of money that I would register of an online writing course that I had my eye on, but of course, life always seemed to get in the way and this plan kept being put back.

Well on Friday morning, the first day of the month, I quit with the excuses, ignored the voices telling me to wait and signed up to the course.

The course comes with a 7-month deadline and your own personal tutor to assess your work and to keep you accountable every step of the way.

I plan to focus the majority of my attention on completing the training and improving my skills as quickly as possible.

During this time, I will still be writing pieces on Medium though perhaps not as frequently.

Over the past week, I’ve not looked at my Medium stats or daily Partner Program earnings at all and it’s felt pretty good, of course, as I haven’t been that active there will be nothing much to look at.

However, I do aim to carry on this practice when I do return to frequent writing again, ignoring these little distractions and putting them out of my mind has allowed me to focus more on what matters and on what I have control over.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed not a lot of writing skills were used during the creation of this piece.

This was more of a quick, conversational piece to ensure I didn’t go too long without writing and also to maybe inspire the reader with the plans that I have for the near future when it comes to achieving my writing goals.

By limiting distractions (ignoring stats etc.) and focusing on what really matters (improving skills through writing course) I have no doubt that this will help me break free from this plateau and allow me to continue pushing to achieve my goals (to grow as a writer on Medium and elsewhere).

Thank you for reading — and for having the endurance to make it to the end, you rock 😊.