How To Start A Life-changing Writing Habit – And Why

For the new year, start a writing habit

Writing is a good habit to build if you’re not already doing it.

If you are like most people, you aren’t. (No judgment.) But you should at least give building a writing habit a try.

Why?

Lots of people talk about the benefits to your self-esteem and your mental state. But for me, it’s super-practical.

Probably 90% of my book The Secret Product Manager Handbook started in my morning pages. Almost all my LinkedIn posts start there.

My podcasts often start as ideas in my morning pages that I then flesh out as scripts.

When I’m stuck on a problem at work, I will often use my daily writing practice to help me solve it. (And it’s surprisingly successful!)

So, when I suggest you have a daily writing practice, it’s 1000% practical advice. I’d be stuck if I weren’t doing it.

Especially for product managers

Expanding on that a bit – product managers need to communicate clearly and persuasively – and very often via writing, whether it’s PRDs, user stories, or presentations for stakeholders.

A writing practice will, at minimum, get you better and more facile at writing.

But, as I intimated above, for me – and hopefully for you – writing daily isn’t just about documenting things. It’s a key tool for me to clarify my thinking and make better decisions.

Balancing act

What I do is not that hard. And I work at not letting it become an end in itself. (Well, it’s a little bit of an end in itself, but in a good way. I’ll talk about that later.)

TL;DR

My advice on how to start a writing habit, simply as someone who has one.

• Use “morning pages” as your approach.
• And do it on a site like 750words.com.

The simplest thing that could possibly work

The simplest advice is just “Write every day.”

But the key thing – and what lets me actually get started (almost) every day – is not to have expectations.

My core approach is based on “morning pages,” a practice defined by Julia Cameron in her great book The Artist’s Way (worth reading!).

The practice is to write three pages by hand without stopping, about anything, before you do any other writing. The key part of that is “about anything.” No assignment, no coherence is needed. It can be “I don’t know what to write,” over and over again.

This exercise is meant to get your mind lubed up. Clean out the resistance and gunk in your brain, and quiet down your internal critic.

I think about cleaning out the coffee maker in the morning before you can make a good new fresh cup of coffee.

Here’s the twist: I don’t do this anymore, though (I did for a long time).

I mean, I stopped writing by hand because I literally could not read what I had written, so it was frustrating.

When you first get started it doesn’t matter. You aren’t meant to be reading what you wrote.

But an interesting thing happens after you’ve been doing this for a while – instead of your morning pages being meaningless words, you start writing stuff that’s useful. And I wanted to be able to reuse some of that stuff.

Three handwritten pages is about 750 words.

What I find is that after I’ve written about 600 words (this is just my number, might differ for you), I can sometimes give myself an “assignment” – and then write against that assignment.

And I will get something useful.

This doesn’t happen every time, and I don’t do it every time, but it happens often enough that I consider it one of my main content creation processes.

For this reason, I also upped my daily word goal, to minimum of 1,000 words. So that gives me time to get the gunk out, and then (if I’m lucky) have a productive writing session. On good writing days I’ll write 1,200-1,500 words, about half of those words reusable as a post, script, newsletter, etc. Literally today I wrote 1,952 words.

Don’t get stuck in the process

I’ve written and podcasted about how sometimes your processes can become more important than the outcomes they are trying to promote. This could easily happen with a writing practice.

On the other hand, a process can, when used well, promote the outcomes. I feel like the morning pages process fits that for me.

It’s like going to the gym. If you have a process that gets you to the gym every day and you actually do a workout when you get there, the process is working for you. Even if the motivation to get in the car is just to preserve your streak of “going to the gym,” it’s still resulting in a workout.

Morning pages are the same way. Especially using 750words.com, the daily impetus is partly to preserve the streak – but I always get the benefit of actually having written, so I’m getting what I want from it.

Writing remains hard

And this is good because, no matter what all the “writing bros” tell you, writing is freaking hard.

Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.”

It’s so hard that many writers, many great great writers, kill themselves instead of writing. Hemingway. Hitchens. Plath. Woolf. Wallace. Bourdain. (Don’t be one of them!)

So, if you find it hard, you’re in good company.

But morning pages are a way to help you get through that initial bleeding process slightly less painfully. And 750words.com gives you that little additional motivation by slightly gamifying it.

There is no guarantee that what happens next will be good, or will serve a purpose. But I find my odds go up a bit when I do it.

Using a tool, ’cause I’m a product manager

Because I’m a product manager and a technologist, which means I like numbers and I like tracking some things, I find writing on a site like 750words.com is gratifying. It tracks my streaks (and is gentle about letting me fix my broken streaks). It counts my words over time, and other statistics. And of course, the slightly gamified aspect helps me get started on those days I’m resistant.

I believe if it weren’t for 750words.com, I would not be writing every day, and I believe the content I have created over the past nine years mostly would not exist. So, it’s good. For me.

Summary

That’s my writing practice:

• I write morning pages every day (nearly every day).
• I use 750words.com to do my writing. It’s a nice writing environment, it counts my words for me, it tracks my streaks (and lets me repair them), and it acts as a repository of all this writing.
• After I’d been doing it for a while (a few months), I started giving myself assignments – and extended the number of words I target every day.

More on giving myself assignments

I don’t always do “assignments.” When I do it usually starts with me asking myself a question (which I will often type in to get started).

For example, a question I used last week (that actually inspired this newsletter edition as well as the idea of doing regular “how-to” newsletters) was “how do I get people onto my mailing list?”

And then I just started typing potential answers to that question.

One thought was to make my newsletter more like Justin Welsh’s, which is almost always a “How to” kind of thing.

And then I started writing out what I could share as “how to” content – and the first thing I thought of was writing.

And this newsletter is the outcome of that. Some of these words came from that morning pages writing session.

Scratching the surface

What questions do you have about having and building a writing practice?

I’ve just barely touched the surface of this topic. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have questions. I’d love to try to answer them. Drop a comment here, or if you are on my mailing list and saw this article there, just reply to the email.