The Eighth Iteration of Developing a Writing Habit

In college, I decided I wanted to become a better writer. Communicating clearly makes you better at everything, since so much of life revolves around communication.

Becoming better at writing is difficult. It's an example of what Buster Benson calls a kiloslog — "1,000 slogs towards the same long-term meaningful shift in identity."

The greatest kiloslogs of my life have been becoming a soccer player, Spanish-speaker, runner, and product designer. They each share a common trait: consistent, intentional practice. When I reflected about writing, I was surprised to realize that I've actually been slogging away at a writing habit for a while. Take a walk with me into the internet archive time machine:

2015: 2pals100days — Inspired by The 100 Day Project, I made a joint Instagram account with my best friend Hanh and we alternated posting about our day-to-day lives during the summer before our senior year of college. It brought us closer and helped me reflect on my experience living in Santiago, Chile.

2016: Chile blog — After I graduated college, I moved back to Santiago and started a Tumblr (!) blog which I completely forgot about until a few months ago. I expected to cringe at my 22-year-old earnestness, but it actually brought me joy and assuredness to read about how fine I was moving abroad without a job, seeing as I'm about to do it again to Portugal.

2017: 100daysofboludez — After Chile, I moved to Buenos Aires and started a daily project drawing doodles of the strange Argentine slang I was learning. After 18 posts I stopped, probably because I was too busy chamuyando.

2018: make.more.scroll.less —  When I moved to Mexico for a month to work on my portfolio and apply to U.S. jobs, I revved back up the 100dayproject machine for a record-setting 147 posts, my largest project to-date. During the pandemic the project got a second wind, but it faded when I realized I wanted to focus more on writing than image-creation.

2020: Notes from Friends — During the dark, endless days of the pandemic, my roommates and I started a decentralized newsletter where anybody could submit anything they wanted to share and blast it out to all of our friends. Sometimes issues had themes, other times it was just an open space for people to pseudonymously share their pandemic angst. We published issues 1-6 on tinyletter and 7-10 on buttondown.

2021: Pandemic Pen Pals — During the later years of the pandemic, my friend Andrew and I spent 100 consecutive days sending short essays and reflections back and forth over WhatsApp. Similar to 2pals100days, having a partner kept me very accountable and I noticed my writing improving, particularly because Andrew is an excellent writer and I was trying my best to keep up with him.

2023: 750words.com — a design leadership coach I worked with told me about about this site as a way to build a writing habit. If you write 750 words, you get a badge with a bird on it. Three in a row and you get a turkey. I was surprised to find how motivated those virtual birds got me — I've written nearly 50,000 words so far. The stream-of-consciousness style of writing is useful for reflection, but I'd like to get better at editing and writing for others, which brings us to our latest iteration:

late 2023: this journal — My goal is to publish or edit 10 times per month. I'm tracking my progress in a Google Sheet, along with my three other daily goals: sweat, learn Portuguese, and work on Dozen. I have so many things I'm excited to write about: how to surf, how to make the perfect egg sandwich, why Venmo is the worst-designed popular app of all time, what makes New York Times Games so fun...

My goals with this journal are to improve the quality of my writing, capture what my life is like right now, and crystalize things I learn. Let's see what happens.