When I initially set a goal for myself, nine times out of ten it will be abstract and unmeasurable; not particularly useful in the long run, but enough to get me moving in the right direction.

My specific fitness goal for 2017 is to be able to hold an l-sit on gymnastics rings, and this goal is helping to shape my long-term approach to fitness throughout the year. On the other hand, I have not had any sort of equivalently defined goal when it comes to writing; it has essentially just been ‘improve writing skills’.

I spent much of the first half of the this month plugging away at what was my first sizeable piece of technical writing, my previous post on using Terraform to set up a new Hugo website on AWS. It took much longer to write than I originally anticipated, and the longer the post remained unfinished, the harder it became to continue working on it.

While a piece of writing taking longer than originally anticipated or intended is not really a problem in and of itself, I found that the unfinished state of the post acted as a blocker preventing me from writing regularly, which in the context of my overall goal to improve my writing skills, is indeed a problem.

This year one of my goals is to improve my writing skills, and one of the ways I’m working towards that goal is to make sure I write something every day.

January was not terribly successful, but February has been a lot better. Initially I was having a lot of trouble getting started, though that has been mitigated by my efforts to consistently write something every day, even if what I start remains incomplete. Having something already on the screen when I sit down to write every day makes getting started a lot easier than it would be just starting at a blank page.

Since the start of the year I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to write more. I realise that many of my biggest hurdles at the moment can be traced a lack of regularity and discipline, but there has been one thing in particular which has caught my attention recently when I’ve been going over topics I’d like to write about: length.

I seem to convince myself that if I cannot (or don’t think I can) write about a certain topic up to a certain arbitrary length, it is not worth even trying to put together a post on that topic.