A tiny experiment: daily blogging
Anyone who has been reading my meanderings for any length of time might have noticed that I’ve been rather active here over the last two weeks. Surely today marks the first time that I’ve posted my writing on this blog 14 days in a row, and it happened because I made a pact with myself. My inspiration for this pact came from a book by Anne-Laure Le Cunff called Tiny Experiments and a blog post by Joan Westenberg called Failure vs. Success is the Wrong Frame. The book’s title characterizes my project over the last two weeks: instead of setting lofty and linear goals (first I’ll do this, and then I’ll do that, etc), one should take on a tiny experiment. Set a goal to do something — make it a small something — but think of the process of doing it as an experiment. The central point of Westenberg’s blog post, as captured in its title, helped me to see how my default approach to trying new things gets in the way of my doing them. The book and blog together pushed me to take this step.
Le Cunff suggests that one define a tiny experiment rather, well, simply: “I will [action] for [duration].” The perspicuous among you will likely have already surmised that my experiment was “I will post an entry to my blog every day for two weeks.” Simple, right? And relatively low stakes. Westenberg’s framing here is helpful: “You’re not betting your identity on the outcome. You’re poking reality to see what it does.” Having done whatever it is, pay attention to what reality does in response; to attend carefully to reality’s response is to learn something about oneself. As Westenberg put it:
Try things. Make things. Share what you learn. Treat your craft like a laboratory instead of an exam room. When something doesn’t work, find out why, write it down and try something else.
There were two goals informing my tiny experiment. The first one, rather obviously, is the goal of posting more regularly and frequently. Could I do that? Would I do that? The tinyness (or tinyhood?) is crucial here — I don’t think I need to be posting every day long term, but I wanted to do it long enough to get a sense for what that discipline would feel like. The second goal is less obvious, but it was the more important one for me: “I’d like to feel more comfortable in posting than I do now.” As I said earlier this week, I struggle to ignore the critic looking over my shoulder as I write. I wondered if writing more frequently, and with the commitment to put my writing out there where someone might actually read it, would help me feel more comfortable. Here again, Westenberg is helpful:
The fear that stops people from making things is almost entirely the fear of the performance frame. Nobody is afraid to experiment. We’re afraid to be judged. And the trick is to stop thinking of yourself as someone performing a skill and start thinking of yourself as a scientist in a lab, running tests, gathering data, slowly building up a picture of what works and what doesn’t. The scientist isn’t brave for continuing after unexpected results. They’re just doing science. That’s what science is.
That’s what science is. I’d say that’s also what learning is.
At the end of the experiment, both Le Cunff and Westenberg say, turn to learning. Le Cunff’s framing of this is straightforward: follow the plus-minus-next strategy.
- What went well? What did you enjoy?
- What didn’t work? What felt off?
- What small tweak can you make based on what you learned?
So, what am I thinking now?
The plus – First, I appreciate the sense of accomplishment: I actually posted something every day. The biggest challenge I faced was coming up with something that seemed worth sharing, but I worked through that. In fact, I enjoyed the process of watching for possible topics — in my reading, in my idle thoughts — and for connections between those topics. Admittedly, some of the posts worked better than others, but I’m ok with that. I’m convinced not only that I wouldn’t have posted every day without this commitment, but also that I wouldn’t have recognized some of those connections. Second, I gradually became more comfortable with putting something out there, even when I knew I could have developed it more fully and/or carefully (and even when that critic looking over my shoulder was pushing me not to post). Finally, I really enjoyed the sometimes surprising direction a post took, seemingly without my direction.
The minus — Perhaps it’s ironic that the first minus that comes to mind is the opposite of one of the positives — A couple of my posts seem rather lame, and I didn’t develop some of my ideas and discussions as fully or carefully as I would like. In addition, I decided not to write on some topics simply because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do them justice in the time I had to work on them. Finally, much of the time spent writing the posts was stolen from time that I would ordinarily have spent reading.
Next — I’m still pondering next steps. I’m definitely going to continue blogging, but I’m not going to hold myself to the commitment to post every day. I’m thinking I might instead have the goal of working on a post (or posts) every day. I’m hesitating here a bit because I know myself well enough to know how easy it is to procrastinate on doing something without the hard stop of actually posting something, I need another way to stay on task. I’m thinking I might try the goal of posting every other day, but it’s much easier for me to do a particular task daily than it is to do it every other day.
The upshot: I’m glad that I did the experiment. I’m working now to frame the next step. And I really do think that this approach might actually work for me.
