I'm trying to write more consistently. Also inspired by James Clear's excellent book Atomic Habits he states one component of his habit-building framework that really stuck with me
Make it easy
Effectively, he details this as the effort to remove as many distractions and barriers as possible to a habit that you want to form. One way I've done this in my personal life is that I leave Clorox Wipes on the fridge so that they're not buried away in a cabinet, which is a motivator to keep the kitchen counters wiped and clean pretty consistently.
I have previously attempted using many different code-driven blogging platforms such as hosting basic HTML and hyperlinking a bunch of pages, using Jekyll hosted on Github pages, even hosting Hugo on Firebase . I have learned a TON and I do love the control over look and feel.
All that being said, I was inspired by this post to take a look back at this habit and ask myself "am I distracting myself from what I really want to accomplish, which is more creation?"
Hugo Workflow
Keep in mind, this workflow was actually an improvement from previous workflows in terms of removing the distractions from writing and getting it on the Internet.
- Open up iTerm
- Navigate to my blog folder
- Create a new formatted blog post via `hugo new blog/<post_name>.md
- Open that new Markdown file in Typora (fantastic Markdown editor btw and will probably be my continued go-to for distraction-free offline editing).
- If I wanted to add an image, I needed to make sure it was in the
static folder and had the correct relative path.
- Write my words
- Run a hugo server and jump into localhost on the browser to make sure nothing broke.
- Build the blog with
hugo
- Make any fixes, including sometimes having to dive into the Hugo theme CSS to fix stuff.
- Deploy to Firebase
- Wait for the Firebase changes to resolve and check out the post on nicacton.com
Hashnode Workflow
- Navigate to Hashnode
- Hit "Create" then "Write Story"
- I'm writing right now. Images, tags, links, etc are covered by internal tooling.
I'm going to attempt this same post on Dev.to, another writing platform I've enjoyed consuming, and see how I feel and where the post goes.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the granularity and control of editing the actual website code and having complete control over the look and feel, but I think it's time for me to focus less on that and more on the actual content and consistency of my writing by removing barriers.
Cover Photo by Jakub Dziubak on Unsplash
