Failing My 2020 New-Years-Resolution.

3 Reasons Why I Failed Writing Articles.

January 5th 2020, was the day I published my first article on Medium. Excited, pumped and overly motivated to tackle my self declared biggest weakness. My journey started — I am becoming a writer.

The resolution was easy. Invest 2–3 hours per week on Sunday and publish one article per month.

Surprisingly this didn’t work out as planned. In the beginning, I tried, but in the end, I didn’t deliver.

5/12 Articles were published in 2020.

I would love to reflect, and here is what I have learned:

Sunday or any fixed day was the wrong choice.

• I underestimated my need for some rest on Sundays. Professional projects and my private life were the priority in 2020, and often I wasn’t able to produce any form of writing on Sundays. My mind was tired, and my thoughts were too foggy.
• Motivation and inspiration didn’t care about my schedule. Ideas came and went. Whenever an idea was fresh, and I observed myself exploring the idea in my thoughts, motivation kicked in. I wrote down some notes, but throughout the week, when Sunday finally “arrived”, the inspiration was long gone, and I wasn’t able to recreate the spark.

Input matters. Stress kills.

• Since I am still figuring out what to write about, I needed some inspirational input that sparks ideas. Those ideas need to grow and mature. Periods of high stress and intense work vanished ideas and killed the growth of idea or concept. I needed to reduce stress to maintain idea flow.
• 2020 I was heavily involved in a professional project that occupied 50–70 hours per week. This created a monotonous pool of potential ideas: same people, same subject. The level of inspirational content was low.

Unrealistic expectations

• I heavily underestimated my ego on this journey. Instead of getting better at writing, I improved my ability to overthink. So many ideas and drafts were unpublished because I was worrying too much. This prevented me from publishing more content.
• With every bit of information, I heavily felt the imposter syndrome. The expectations I had for myself were way too high, especially for my first baby steps.

After this little self-reflection session, my next goal is to at least finish my 12 articles in 2021 by taking care of the things that prevented me from writing.

Luckily, I decided to change my professional career radically so that I will do two things during this transition phase.

1. Reduce workload on my professional projects to create space to think.
2. Use this space to think clearly and explore ideas and concepts.
3. Experiment with writing on different days and time of day.
4. Write, write, write and publish. Don’t dwell too much.

Thanks for reading. You are awesome.

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