Throughout 2023, I struggled to form a daily publishing habit in spite of a long-held deep desire to do so. I tried several approaches, but the longest streak I managed was nine daily posts in a row.
I think my problem was that I neglected to follow habit master James Clear’s Two-Minute Rule:
When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
I was primarily focused on publishing every day, and it takes me more than two minutes to write anything I consider worth publishing. According to Clear, that approach is a recipe for failure.
If a daily habit takes longer than two minutes, it’s too easy to skip. And, once you “break the chain,” it might be days, weeks, or months before you start rebuilding it.
So Clear counsels people to scale down whatever habit they want to form into a two-minute version. As he wrote:
“Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.”
“Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.”
“Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.”
“Fold the laundry” becomes “Fold one pair of socks.”
“Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.”
For me, “publish an essay” has become “write one sentence for an essay,” which I can do in two minutes.
For building my writing habits, writing one sentence every day is my top imperative. No matter how uninspired or busy I get, I must write that sentence. And whether I write that sentence must not depend on whether I think I will be able to finish and publish the whole essay.
I must “master the art of showing up,” as Clear puts it. I must build, not break, the daily sentence chain. And I’m confident that I will, because the daily bar is so low. It will be easy from the get-go, and every day I do it, it will become easier still as the habit forms.
And that will be solid groundwork I can build on. This two-minute, one-sentence habit is what Clear calls a “gateway habit.” Once I write that sentence, I will be more in “writing mode,” and more drawn to continue writing. It will be more likely that I will end up finishing and publishing a whole essay, even though that’s not my top imperative.
That is how this published essay, my fourth daily post in a row, came about. That streak stemmed from a longer streak of ten daily sentences in a row.
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” — Lao Tzu
For more on the Two-Minute Rule, see chapter 13 of James Clear’s great book Atomic Habits.