Violinist Hilary Hahn started a 100 Days of Practice project. She posted a video of her practicing violin on Instagram for 100 days with #100daysofpractice and invited others to join her. That started a movement.

Austin Kleon (the writer of How To Steal Like an Artist) came up with a grid to log his progress for 100 days. He calls it PRACTICE to SUCK LESS grid. 

To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less. — Austin Kleon.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. You can use it to improve your handwriting, sketching, writing, stamina, singing, or playing an instrument. I used it to get better at social media. 

I sucked at social media. My friends complained that I never posted anything or left comments on their posts. I used to think social media was for boring people who had nothing better to do with their time until I discovered its power to build your profile. 

At the start of 2021, I set myself a goal to publish on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. for 100 days consecutively. It was an extremely successful experiment. Not only, I built my profile and learned heaps about the platforms, but my follower number swelled as well. 

Today is the Day 96 of the experiment. Here is the scorecard.

I missed only two days. Those were busy days, but if I had planned, I would have been able to publish on those days as well.

So pleased I am with the growth that consistency brought that I decided to use it with writing articles.

I have wanted to write every day on Medium for some time now but wasn’t successful. The closest I have come to publishing 4 articles in a row.

My rational is, if I can do it on social media, I can do it on Medium too.

Each article doesn’t have to be 1000–1500 words long; it could be 300 words. All stories don’t have to be non-fiction, it could be fiction too.

“Lower your standards for what counts as progress and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism.” — Adam Grant

What is the aim?

To get better. 

To bring the article writing time down from 5–6 hours to 1–2 hours.

To build a system to publish every day. 

Writing an article a week is harder than writing an article a day. 

Initially, I will not worry about whether my headlines are good enough or not, whether I need more research more or my article is plain right boring. Initially, I am going to aim at publishing every day.

I agree with Tim Denning when he wrote:

It frustrates me because so much time is spent agonizing over tiny grammar mistakes, whether a headline is clickbait, and the attributes of viral writing. All of it misses the point: who cares?

Write what you want to write. You do you.

Being yourself is the most profitable business idea I can think of when it comes to any form of online content creation.

I think the reason we don’t get out and achieve because we try to do what other people are doing. We forget to be us. To do what we do.

So I am going to write what I want to write, and in the process going to learn what works for me.

My strategy to succeed.

Build a system and hone it over next three months.

Desire is what gets you started; system is what makes you deliver.

Most of my articles come to me when I am reading other people’s articles. A single line might trigger a thought which becomes a full-blown article. I might agree with them or disagree with them.

I stop reading at that point and start jotting down my thoughts. If I am on the computer, I create a new draft on Medium; if not, I do it on the phone, notebook, or back of an envelope.

I write nonstop until I have penned down everything that comes to me without worrying about structuring them or even rationalizing them. Before leaving it, I make a note if I need to do any research for anything.

Each morning, after breakfast, I pick one of the drafts and start the research. While researching the angle and structure of the article start taking shape.

I work in several 15 minutes spurts, taking breaks to do housework in between. By lunchtime, my article is done. I leave it for two hours and cook lunch.

When I come back to it, I read it slowly, make final edits and publish it between four and five pm.

I write at least ten articles ideas a day in my Idea Journal; hence I am never short of ideas. My goal is to get to the point when I can write an article on any topic with little or no research.

I intent to publish at least one fictional story and one travel article each week giving enough variety to my readers.

I also intend to have a few articles as a backup for days when I can get to the computer (a lesson learned from publishing on social media).

And lastly I will do many things in bulk such as inserting the images, footer and sketches etc.

Where to publish?

My biggest challenge is how to get published the same day. Many publications take one to three weeks to publish stories.

The Ascent takes more than a week. World Travelers Blog takes 4–5 days. Data Driven Investor takes 1–2 days. Illumination has been the best so far. Dr Mehmet Yildiz has been publishing my stories within few hours of submission. 

While researching for it I found a brilliant article by Michael ‘Myk Eff’ Filimowicz, PhD. Michael suggests four ways to get your stories into Medium publications:

The Front Door: The Front Door is when a publication has a big sign hanging on their site basically saying, ‘Open for Business!’ it’s the easiest, most direct, clearest, and obvious method.

The Back Door: The Back Door is Smedian. Smedian is a publication created by Casey Botticello, a top Medium writer to demystify writing on Medium. It has a list of all Medium publications with the ‘Request to Contribute’ link. You can look for publications by using its search tool.

The Side Entrance: Believe it or not, some publications, particularly Medium’s own publication, do not a SUBMIT tab on its front end or a ‘Request to Contribute’ button on its Smedian back end. Literally Literary publication is like that. To submit to publications like it, you have to do a web search, and the submission guidelines will appear in one of their many past online stories. This might be irrelevant now as E V William has disbanded Medium publication. 

VIP Lane: This is when a publication owner invites you to submit your story to their publication. You receive a notification like this, “Hey, we love this story; we’d like to publish it.”

This is my favourite kind of publishing strategy. 

I am going to publish some of the stories on my profile and then wait for an invitation from the publications.

It gives you become-so-good-that-they-come-to-you kind of feeling.

In the end

Wish me luck and join the challenge if you wish.

“Humans are the new low-attention span goldfishes, thanks to smartphones.” wrote Tim Denning in one of his articles.

The advertisement industry figured it out long ago. That is why the TV ads are less than eleven seconds.

Now the publishing industry is finding that thicker books don’t sell. A four hundred-page novel is considered as long as War and Peace. I, too, put books back on the shelf if they are too thick, thinking I don’t have time to finish it.

Today we are taking in much more information than when there were no computers or smartphones.

Emails, blog posts, social media, articles, newsletters, and ebooks have turned us into binge readers. We jump from one thing to another all day long, hardly leaving us any time to read quality books for an extended length of time.

The same goes with our To-Do Lists. The sheer number of tasks we have on our To-Dp Lists means that while we are doing one thing, we are also worrying about ten other things.

Add to that the interruptions by social media. No wonder our attention spans are decreasing dramatically.

Short Attention Span is not just limited to some.

The ability to focusing on tasks for any length of time without being distracted is much more widespread.

And the main cause for it is the kind of society we live in. Here are some statistics:

In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986 — the equivalent of 174 newspapers.

Even during our leisure time, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day.

The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images.

That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour.

And computer gaming consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet.

Source: Why It’s So Hard To Pay Attention, Explained By Science

The situation is not going to change.

The data around us will continue to grow. We will continue to be bombarded by thousands of stimuli each day. The distractions we face every day while working are not going to go away. Instead, they are going to increase while we are doing one thing.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Our brains are equipped to process the information, and it does so by separating the trivial from the important, but it happens at a cost. It makes us tired.

Tiredness leads to a shorter attention span.

So, what to do?

We need strategies to learn to survive.

Here is what you can do.

You don’t have to eat everything offered in the buffet.

We are living in times of excess. Unlimited food, unlimited clothes, unlimited books, unlimited movies, unlimited TV.

But you don’t have to consume everything.

Choose wisely.

Choose the books you want to read, clothes you want to wear, movies you want to watch and limit their consumption.

Limit your consumption by time.

Allocate 15 to 20 minutes to social media a day and don’t go over that. You will have to train yourself for that, but it is possible. The best way is to tag it to another activity that is limited.

I only check social media while having breakfast. When breakfast ends, so does my time to check social media apps. You might want to use your commute time or washroom time to check social media.

Set small goals

Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier, using a simple strategy. He knew he could run a 400-meters race in under a minute. He just trained himself to run four 400-meters races consecutively.

You may not be able to focus on a task for twenty minutes straight. Start with five minutes of total concentration several times a day. Set a timer for 5 minutes, get a part of the task done, and take a break. Do another 5 minutes, Do another 5 minutes and build it to twenty minutes.

If you can’t find time to read books, read only ten pages a day. It takes only 10 minutes to read ten pages at average speed. If you can read for 10 minutes twice a day, you can finish a 300-page book in a fortnight.

Take a 30-day challenge.

When you do a task for 30 days in a row, your ability to do that task increases many folds.

Bodybuilders used this technique all the time. They do a small set of exercises every day to build specific muscles.

You, too, can develop your writing muscles by writing every day for a short period. That period could be as small as five minutes. Do it for 30 days in a row, and you will discover you can write much more in five minutes compared to when you started.

Meditate

The reason for a low attention span is distractions and a lack of practice to control our minds.

Meditation is the single most beneficial exercise to enhance concentration. Even a five-minute session is enough to calm the mind. Start and end your day with five minutes of guided or self-directed meditation, and watch your attention span improves tremendously.

Summary

Our attention span is decreasing due to the amount of information we are getting bombarded with. Unfortunately, the situation is not going to get better. Rather it will get worse.

Our brains can process only a limited amount of information before it gets tired. Since information overload is not going to decrease, we have to develop our own strategies to function at the optimum level. Some of the strategies are:

1. You don’t have to take everything in. Choose what you want to consume and choose wisely.
2. Put time restrictions on information consumption such as social media. Tie it with some other activity such as commuting or having breakfast.
3. Build concentration in small steps. Start with five minutes and build it to twenty minutes.
4. Increase your skills and productivity by doing a task every day for 30 days.
5. Learn to control and focus your mind through meditation. Start with five-minute sessions.

Photo by Cici Hung on Unsplash