On November 28th, 2019, I started an experiment of blogging daily for 100 days. I had been listening to many podcasts/books by Seth Godin. He challenges listeners to blog daily for 100 days and see what happens. As far as I can tell, Seth Godin has been writing daily for over well over 7 years.
Blogging daily was like a Bootcamp. As you would expect, I got better at the act of writing. But, there were some things I really did not expect. If you're someone who's been meaning to blog, or you battle with perfectionism or self-criticism, then read on.
I had a few rules during the experiment. Most of them came from Seth.
- Publish daily blog posts including weekends and holidays. Try to plan ahead during the holiday season if I'm going to be too busy.
- Do not try to make money on ads.
- Do not promote each blog post to try to get more viewership. It's ok to blog into the void.
- Offer my opinions and beliefs. Try to add value with my perspective. Do not try to re-document something already documented, it doesn't help people.
- Try to help someone with the post, even if it's one person.
I found my voice
Before the experiment, I wrote 14 blog posts in two years. I still remember my first blog post. I spent most of a Saturday writing and re-writing and re-writing, trying to express my opinion. Then that evening, I remember a sinking feeling and starting over the next day with a whole different topic. The result was this.
It took 8 hours of work.
I had a tough time forming ideas, explaining them, and presenting them. I had a hard time telling stories. I had the same problem at work too. Often, my ideas were passed up because I could not present them to my peers in an effective way. They often could not see the value even though I believed strongly in some of these ideas.
Blogging daily forced me to write and hit the "publish" button. It helped me let go of the perfectionism and self-criticism that made me rewrite my first blog post. I just had to write. Once it was published, I could decide if that blog post was something I liked and I could improve the next day.
I experimented with two main styles of posts:
- Talking about a concept/idea/opinion (without code)
- How-to article (with code)
In the beginning, I wrote a lot of blogposts around concepts/ideas/opinions. It felt therapeutic because they were pent up ideas that I always thought about.
Soon, after I ran out of concepts, I started trying to write more about "how-to" do something. In the beginning, I would try to explain things I knew really really well.
In the end, it took me about 1 hour to write a blog post centered around an opinion. I could think about these ideas throughout the day and I did not have to create code samples. It took around 2 hours to write a "How-to" blog post if I knew the topic really well and I didn't have to learn something new.
It pushed me to help people
After the first 30 days or so, I needed inspiration on what to write next. I started to reach out to friends, clients, and colleagues to see what they were up to. There were about 10 individuals who I stayed in contact with and took an interest in.
If they told me they were struggling with something I knew about, I wrote a blog post. Then, I would say, "Look, here's a blog post I wrote about that thing we were talking about. Let me know if it helps."
It also helped me with the act of writing. To me, writing is so much easier if I know "who" I'm writing for. In most cases, I was writing to help a specific individual.
For example, as I am writing right now, I am thinking of a few friends. I have inspired them to blog and a few have created their own blog sites. Most of them started creating the sites but never finished them. A few, have blogs but very few blog posts. One was told that they did not get a job because their blog did not reflect the experience they claimed to have for the job.
Went from ~60 views/week to ~1.2k views/week
But here's the kicker: no self-promotion. I did not Tweet or post on LinkedIn about new blog posts. This was one of the rules of the experiment. I would only share my blog post when I was helping someone directly.
Where did the other views come from? Search.
It took about 6 months for search engines to catch up. It is a slow and steady trickle of traffic. Not for the dopamine junkies.
I stopped blogging daily in March 2020 and traffic keeps coming. People are finding the site and reading.
Recently, a co-corker was surprised to find out that he was sharing my blog post with someone.
He ran across my most popular blog post right now. I do remember writing that post and thinking to myself: "Man, I'm truly writing this for [person]. I wonder if anyone else will find this. It's so niched."
I realized I needed a morning routine
On the last day of the experiment, I reflected:
I’ve hit publish from the back of Lyfts, from airports, from hotel rooms, from the train, from my home office, from my couch, in between holiday gatherings, first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. It’s been close. It’s hard on my family when I didn’t plan. Saturdays are still hard.
It was not sustainable. My wife was also committed to this experiment, it was not only me. It was tough on her. If I ever wanted to publish content at any cadence with a full-time job, I would need a routine. It needed to be sustainable.
So, after the experiment, I did not continue to publish daily. I focused on creating a morning routine so that I would have 1-2 hours before the workday. I put a strong limit on the hours I worked. Any type of overtime meant that it would eat into my morning routine.
The current iteration of my morning routine is:
- My 3-month old daughter wakes up at 5 am or 6 am.
- I take my daughter, play with her, make coffee, listen to NPR while my wife sleeps.
- After an hour, I will start writing, coding, or whatever else my current side project is. (I'm writing while I'm wearing my daughter and she sleeps)
- At 7:45-8:00 am, I wake my second daughter and I take her for a morning run.
- 8:30-8:45 am - Second coffee and shower.
- 9:00 am - Workday starts.
I needed to protect my time
Sometimes, I would get so busy during the day and realize that it was almost over and I didn't get done half the things I wanted to do. Then, I was tempted to work overtime to catch up.
Sometimes, I would get distracted and forget to do the things I needed to do. Then, it was a rush to try to get it done. I seemed to have the anxiety of all the things that were in-flight and how I might forget them.
I came across an idea: Time is the only resource you cannot get more of.
You can get more money, experience, skill, etc. You cannot get more time. It's one of our most precious resources.
Besides, remember how sometimes I would write late at night or while in a Lyft? I was not making time to blog and my time was really not under my control.
So, I implemented techniques discussed in Indistractible. I block out time for many things.
It's low tech. Ugly.
Maybe... it's making your skin crawl. But, it works for me.
- I am less anxious. When I commit to something in the future, I set time aside for it. It could be later that day, the next day, next week, or in the next couple of weeks.
- I over-commit less. I open my calendar and try to book it. If I don't have time, then I say so. If it's my boss, I try to negotiate what's the priority so that I can move things around in my calendar.
- It protects my calendar from unexpected meetings. People are often forced to schedule a time for next week. If they want to meet sooner, then they have to ask me when it's a good time for me. I control my time. This was really useful in a larger organization where there's a lot of people that want to talk to you via meetings.
- Ever have a meeting where you think... "this could have been an email"? Less of these will happen.
- In my day job, time is literally money. I am a consultant and my company charges for the time I spend on projects. This helps me ensure that I put time-management at the forefront.
- When I have less anxiety that I am getting done what I need to get done, I can spend my free time happily.
I became much better at communicating remotely
Many people complain about meetings meetings meetings. To get anything done, many companies have meetings to talk about problems and solutions. Then there are more meetings before the meetings. Then there are meetings to plan work. Then there are meetings to reflect on work. And, so on and on.
To break away from the synchronous communication of meetings, we need asynchronous communication. The best way for that is - writing.
At work, I can write very descriptively very quickly. I can write detailed documentation, show my work, provide instructions very clearly. It's like I'm writing tiny little blog posts all the time.
That Slack post, took me about 10 minutes. Mostly, because I had to fetch the names of the Azure resources. It's a tiny little blog post that I will use in final documentation later. In the past, it would have taken me about a half-hour. Besides, it avoided a meeting.
This was an email to the client. Also, took about 5-10 minutes. In the past, it would have taken me about a half-hour.
I used to dread writing emails like this. Now, I enjoy it. Sometimes, I think it helps me more than it helps the reader. I often find myself referring back to my own blog posts, emails, slack messages to remind myself of my work. It's very useful in a world of interruptions and context-switching.
I realized I needed to leave my job
I was writing about topics that were not supposed to be my core competency in my day job. I was either not excited or did not have much to share in the areas that were supposed to be my core competencies. For me, it signaled that I was spread too thin and I was filling myself with knowledge in too many areas. Jack of all trades, master of none.
At one point, I was trying to find a headline for my blog to describe the stream of information. The best I could come up with was: "Azure. DevOps. Kubernetes."
But, I really wanted to focus on one of those parts. I did not feel like I could best serve clients if I was spread too thin. So, I started looking to see what it would mean to try to focus.
In mid-2020, I made the jump to a small consulting company, BoxBoat, that focuses on Kubernetes consulting. I further try to specialize in helping clients with Kubernetes on Azure.
Readers started reaching out
I had people, whom I never met, email me at my personal and work emails. They would thank me and sometimes ask additional questions.
I'm not really sure where they found my email. I didn't advertise it anywhere. Maybe, they took a guess at it. So, unless I'm missing something, I think these people were going out of their way to send me a note or ask for help. Anyway, I'm delighted.
Then after a few exchanges...
Conclusion
The best way I can summarize the experience was a Bootcamp to get a blog jumpstarted that also taught me how to serve an audience. And, I had a few little surprises along the way.
If you're someone who's been meaning to start a blog, maybe you have a burial ground of drafts, then this experiment could be great for you. Commit to it and see what you learn.
For what it's worth, I've tried 100 days of running daily and 100 days of doing the dishes daily. I could not do the dishes daily.
Thanks for reading. And, if you're interested in building cloud-native apps on Azure, subscribe to my blog at https://gaunacode.com.
If you want to see what I'm up to, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Top comments (54)
Such an awe inspiring story!!
Being a college freshmen, it is hard to blog.
But you sir are doing this stuff as a father with having a full time job is even more tough!
Than you for your wonderful story. It motivates me to do more!
Wow, that's amazing. It didn't even cross my mind to write a blog post when I was in college. I told myself false stories that I didn't have anything to share or contribute.
I see you blogged today on dev.to too. Very cool! I have no clue what you're talking about since I don't do frontend dev. It sounds smart. 😂
Keep it up!
Bro you are trolling me!! haha!!
I would love to become a devops dev in near future.
Loved your story!!
Pay attention here, guys and gals :-) Timeboxing (the calendar thing) is the best invention ever to get things done. You just don't have time for distractions. Your time is planned in advance already. Henry Kissinger comes to mind: "There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full."
Great post Facundo, thank you!
I recently started my blog mainly to improve my English, being forced to write more often. There are four articles published so far and it has been an interesting challenge... difficult but rewarding. I'm trying to maintain a consistency of one article per week... I can't even imagine one per day!
Hi Darlan, if you're able to do it weekly, good for you, I couldn't do it. Before I tried to blog daily, I wanted to blog monthly. I never reached my goal. For me, it was a mix of perfectionism and procrastination.
So, sometimes I explore extremes to find balance. In other words, find the edges so I can tell where the middle is.
Great read!
I had a similar experience in the very early days of the rapsberry pi being released I made a personal blog to house all of the "how to fix this problem" issues on the pi I was having.
It covered everything from moving from SD cards to external drives through to setting up mono for c# development on the little pi.
As you found, it was slow and for me to start off with. I wanted a single place to go to and read very simple and to the point instructions on what needed to be done to get X or y problem fixed along with some exception cases for certain versions or common issues.
About 3 months after trying to blog a couple of times a week I noticed all the external traffic coming in. Infact the surge in popularity spurred a new post about moving from hosting wordpress on the pi to compiling static pages with Jekyll.. another banger of a post which surged activity even more.
It was super fulfilling to see comments flooding in and all the cross linked posts coming from external sites and stackoverflow. As with you, I found my style, no bull simple instructions.
Eventually I got far too busy with life and some family illnesses resulted in me leaving the blog to decay. Your post has got me thinking about kicking this off again though. The satisfaction of seeing some of my posts being discussed in online meet ups and on presentation slides from hackathons really kept my motivation going.
Wow, that's really cool. You're inspiring me too 😂. First, maybe I should enable comments on my site so that it's easier to interact.
Second, I've had this side project of creating a Kubernetes PI cluster on my list for a long time. It'd be to experiment with advanced deployment practices in a hybrid cloud setting (with Azure).
What's your site?
I don't know what I'm looking for yet, maybe inspiration. Thanks for sharing!
What a great read! I was recently thinking about blogging more frequently, so I loved reading your experiences. I currently publish one article each week alongside a YouTube video and they are almost always in a "how to do" format that you mention. I might need to look into adding some opinion based articles in between and hope that doesn't stretch me too thin.
Thanks Aleks, your latest blog posts look amazing. I wish I had the time to go make a video along with them too. Also maybe... I'm making it out harder and more time-consuming than it really is.
Here's an example of a opinion-based article on my blog.
Seth's blog is nothing but opinions and he blogs daily. It could be useful to check out his blogs daily for a couple of weeks to get the feel.
If you want to keep it more practical, here's an idea - you could do more "behind the scenes" content since ideally you already have the content to show. Examples:
Thank you Facundo, those are some excellent ideas and resources! I'll keep my eye on both yours and Seth's blogs.
To be fair, my process is reversed - most of the time I start out with a project I want to build, do a video around it, and then do an article based on the video. But, there are definitely things that don't warrant their own video which would fit nicely in a more condensed article format.
I will think about it and see if I can make it happen. I am definitely optimizing a lot of what I do along the way. I started writing/recording pretty recently, and like you said - the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Yeah, regarding your projects, that makes a lot of sense. When I said "projects", I didn't mean side projects. I assumed that you were a freelancer/consultant for some reason and what I was really meaning was "client projects."
Your process on starting with the video makes sense and I might give it a shot in the future.
Goodluck!
Hey Facundo,
Can't believe I haven't seen your blog around, I'm currently on a 250+ streak already.
And it's so much fun for my like you know people get addicted to gyming, I got addicted to blogging.
It's like you state sometimes even easier to blog about it, then to explain to just 1 person.
What I'm wondering, did the result only came AFTER you stopped? Or did you have high views during the time as well?
Another Q: Why did you not continue?
Hi Chris! Wow, I'm really impressed 🤯. You probably haven't seen me around because this is my first dev.to blog post 😊. In my world, I don't run into dev.to articles that much so I've never been active until now.
The results started to trickle in towards the end of the experiment. I was really focused on following the rules. I did not want to chase views/likes/thumbs up for vanity.
After the 100 days, I asked my wife what she thought if I kept going. She nearly had a conniption. Up to that point, I didn't have a morning routine and I was just fitting time into my day to get a blog out. It was really tough for her.
I realized that if I wanted any chance of publishing any content in a cadence, I'd have to make it sustainable. So, I started to work on a morning routine. It took time because I had to do other things like going to bed on time and that meant sleep training my daughter and hire a cleaning service to spend less time doing chores.
After I had a morning routine, I used it to do things like running daily for 100 days, learning new things, getting a bunch of certifications, and other things.
Then my second daughter was born. I had to start all over with the routine, finding a new sleep schedule, etc.
Right now, I have about 1-2 hours each weekday to do something personal like blogging, learning, side-project. That's sustainable for me and my family.
I'm curious, do you blog on top of your day job? Or do you blog during work hours?
Also, is daily-dev-tips.com/ hosted on hashnode? It looks great. You're doing so many things I want to be doing. Amazing! 👏👏
Hey yes fully got you,
I started in lockdown, so it was easy was just using my "travel time" to blog, so didn't even notice it.
By the time I had 200 articles, my Fiance thought I would stop, but when I told her I want at least 365 she was shocked.
For me it's still "free-time" since I haven't gone back to the office, but also have to admit the weekends can be killing and not talking holidays to not-publish as well.
So possibly after this year I'll stop doing weekends and holidays.
But definitely want to keep up with the habit.
Let's wait until we are married and even consider kids, I think my tone will be different then haha.
Also, my blog is an eleventy self hosted blog, I do repost to hashnode and dev.to.
Thanks!
Awesome! I am sure it has been asked, but can you talk about the logistics? How did you build the blog? Are you cross-posting? How are you getting traffic to your blog? Trying to do something similar (personal blog and cross posting) but a little slow-going. Wondering if you looked into Hashnode. Great post btw!
Hi Moneer,
I did not promote my blog. This very blog post is the first time I'm shining a light on my site. Most of my traffic has been coming from Google searches.
I am not cross-posting yet. I have aspirations about it but I have limited time and I put the focus on creating content first.
I learned about Hashnode last Friday. It looks cool. It might have saved me a lot of time I spent on creating my own website.
For the site itself, I use GitHub, Netlify, and Netlify CMS. The site is created with Jekyll.
Did that answer your questions? Anything else you want to know?
Excellent! That answers all my questions. My site is very similar in terms of the tech stack. Now I just have to write more! Keep up the good work and thanks for the inspiration
Thanks, very inspiring!
I like writing a lot and have been writing for myself for last 4 years. Recently started publishing as a blog.
I was wondering, have you ever experienced the impostor syndrome? If yes, how did you overcome it? I have collected 30+ topics for future articles but I often feel reluctant to write about on those topics.
Hi, I suffer from impostor syndrome.
TLDR; if you're having impostor syndrome, ask yourself "am I misleading someone?" If the answer is no, then continue.
I heard once the idea that if you're pushing hard enough, you will feel like an impostor.
For example, if I were to blog about using React the "best way" then yeah I should feel like an impostor... I am not a front-end dev world-renoun expert.
But if I were to blog about, "My experience using React as a backend developer" then I will probably still FEEL like an impostor because I don't know React well but it would be authentic since I would be talking about my experience. People reading will know the context that I am a backend developer.
Another example, I could have titled this article, "how to jumpstart your blog to thousand of views" but it didn't feel authentic because I don't consider myself a content marketing expert.
Hope that helps.
Facundo
What CMS do you use? I see you posted about going wordpress -> Jekyll but is that where you decided to stay?
I want to get away from Medium and just stick to writing posts with MarkDown. I'm trying too find out the most dead simple way to do that. Dev.to seems like a promising place to post but I'd like to have a backup on my own site sometime.
Hi Raymond,
🤔 I didn't start with Wordpress. I never used it. Maybe I misspoke somewhere.
I found the _dev.to _writing experience to be amazing.
I started with Jekyll over three/four years ago and I sunk a lot of time into it. I spent a lot of time modifying its default theme to make it what I want. I was never satisfied with my front-end skills, so then I bought a Jekyll theme. I've tweaked it since.
I've considered cross-posting this post to Medium before. Why do you want to get away from Medium? I'm curious.
With Jekyll, I use Netlify and Netlify CMS. Netlify CMS is really simple and the editor is very bland. I write with markdown, but it is a little quirky.
Here's a starter for Netlify, Netlify CMS for Gatsby
github.com/netlify-templates/gatsb...
Gatsby is similar to Jekyll but based in React instead of Ruby.
Man, I have always thought of writing blog posts, I always start the early on weekend, write for a few hours or well most of the day, and stop at a point. And that's it never get back to it. I just realized reading your story that I haven't written more than 8 blog posts in the past 4 years. It's hard to blog but reading your motivation, I will for sure get back to writing weekly at least.
Thanks for sharing, awesome stuff.
It is hard! But, the more you do it, the easier it gets. You could start by breaking it up into 30 minutes each day so that you don't feel like you have this burden on the weekends.
Here's some inspiration:
jamesclear.com/daily-routines-writers