Blogging Isn't Successful Until It Becomes A Habit.

New Year's Resolutions. More Systems. Fewer Goals. Bridget Phetasy comments today on the failure of New Year's Resolutions, and compares the phenomenon to her inability to finish a script and a novel. We tend to let life interfere with our intentions. This is one of the reasons I stopped making New Year's Resolutions. If I dropped a pound for every year I failed at my resolutions to lose weight, I would be doing male model commercials. But, failing at setting goals isn't inevitable. We need to set the conditions to make our goals attainable. Setting up systems that allow us to trick our minds into performing and making good decisions out of habit. How does a slacker like the FutureLawyer manage to write over 16,000 blog posts in 18 years? I didn't set out to become the most prolific law blogger in the world. Adding poetry and philosophy and humor to the blog helped; but, I didn't wake up in 2005 and make a resolution to blog every day. I set up a system. I started rising at 3 A.M., or, at the latest, 5:30 A.M. This required making a conscious decision to go to bed at 8 or 9 P.M. This, by the way, becomes much easier when you are getting old. Then, once I was up, the Internet and computers made it easy to get into the habit of reading everything my fingers could find, and checking out as many news aggregators as I could find. I couldn't read for 10 minutes without finding something that was interesting, and I found that I couldn't help but write about it. It became a habit, and, now, I look up 18 years later, and there is a body of work that never would have happened if I made a New Year's Resolution to do it. Some writers say that they have to write. It is part of their DNA. That may be true; but, Bridget's husband is right. First, you have to set up the system. Then, everything happens, and one day you reach your goal.