“Write Every Day” Is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects

its funny, but in his book "Deep work", the author points that many successful writers schedule deep work to make it easy to execute. Plus in daily rituals by mason curry, I see almost all of successful writers use some sort of schedule to write or create everyday. I myself have tried his weekly approach and as many of the comments mentioned above, I kept pushing it of till the weekends. I think the point is valid and each person is on a different level, but "write every day" ISNT NECESSARILY A BAD ADVICE....

> The author doesn't seem to understand the difference between motivation and discipline. He has been successful into tricking himself into a frequent state of writing motivation. He's very lucky to have done so.

In strong agreement with this comment. The idea of writing every day is to create a habit of writing. It is not about motivation. Imagine taking a walk after dinner everyday for many years. It becomes a necessity. Similarly with writing, you want to convert a conscious decision to work, into a visceral feeling that you just have to do it. Consequently, you don't have to dip into your limited willpower supplies.

Source: I just finished writing a book after writing daily for 2+ years. Sitting down to write became much easier when it became a habit.

> By being far easier to pull off

If that were true, I suppose that would be a good argument in favor of a different cadence. But I don't see that the author presents a compelling case for that.

> less prone to slipping and demotivation?

As others here noted, having a rigid work schedule isn't about motivation, it's about discipline. Motivation is easy. Every aspiring writer has piles of it. J. K. Rowling is beloved by almost the entire world and is a billionaire. Few roles are held in esteem as much as being a successful published writer, and many dream of an idealized full-time writing life of quietly sitting next to the window with their typewriter/laptop/pen and paper sipping tea while they craft their next opus.

What's hard is discipline—the willpower to translate that motivation into the grinding work of carving out sentences for hours on end. A schedule helps with that.

I'm personally not convinced that a longer schedule cadence makes discipline easy. My experience is that it tends towards the opposite. A longer period of reckoning gives you more time to procrastinate and get out of the habit of doing the work.

A day might be too short for many—it is hard to keep up—but I think a week might be too long for even more.

> Quantitative changes often lead to qualitative differences

Yes, I totally agree. However, the author doesn't seem to realize that's what he was arguing.

What stands out to me is that the author has correctly identified a problem, but provides an unsupported solution that has failed for a lot of people.

I'm going to push Duhigg's Power of Habit here as a somewhat more rigorous treatment of these ideas. Duhigg, I think, would agree that "write every day" is an awful plan. His solution, though, would not be "write when you feel like it". Rather, it would be to establish a clear, reliable trigger for when to sit down and write.

"Every day" is the sort of standard that leaves you staring at a blank page at midnight, debating whether to just go to bed. "In the quiet stretch after dinner and dishes", by contrast, gives you a clear cue to do your task. It also averts the problem of falling of the bandwagon - if you go out to dinner, or work late and skip the meal, you never got your cue and don't have to record a 'failure' of your system.

It's certainly the case that never-fail systems are fragile and unproductive; until the habit is ingrained they tend to collapse altogether at the first interruption. But the solution isn't to abandon scheduling, it's to learn what good, proactive scheduling looks like.

Also that discipline begets motivation. Exercise every day. Pretty soon you feel bad if you don't exercise.