Hello Beeminder-graph-telling-us-we-have-to-publish-a-blog-post-today. Very fitting for this post about why and how to commit to a writing schedule. This is adapted from last year’s Inkhaven. I tried to tone down the original version of this post on LessWrong so it wouldn’t be too much of a Beeminder infomercial. Now I can let my freak flag fly. I mean my promotion-of-our-business flag.
This post is for writers, especially the kind with a Substack or blog or newsletter. (Separately, we’d like to convince you that most ways you might aspire to contribute to the world benefit from writing about what you’re doing and promoting your ideas.)
It’s very boring to say “consistency is key” and “fraction \(1-\varepsilon\) of success is showing up” or however that goes, but we want to convince you it matters more than you’d think. Plus we have practical tips, most but not all of which involve Beeminder.
1. Your audience ♥ predictable schedules
For some years we’ve had our Beeminder blog-publishing goal (check it out in the sidebar) set to one post every other Tuesday night [1].
Substack goes on and on about this and recommends posting weekly. Part of it is demonstrating your general reliability, but most is reader psychology. There’s the anticipation of new posts, the routine and habituation of reading them — readers mentally budgeting for it. When a new post appears unexpectedly, even if it’s a pleasant surprise, people are more likely to put off reading it, which means they’re less likely to end up reading it.
Of course what really makes readers drop like flies is when you take a hiatus that’s long enough that they forget they ever subscribed and think your new post (or the notification for it) is spam. There are even email deliverability concerns. Mailchimp says that going more than a month without sending something is bad and if it’s been six months you should really have everyone reconfirm they even want to be subscribed.
2. Slopes sure are slippery
But you’re not going to go a month without posting, you say? You just need one more day to do some more editing? And one more day doesn’t matter so much? Yes yes yes. The danger is saying “one more day won’t matter” day after day until your blog is covered in cobwebs.
So even if you don’t care about your readers, consistency matters for you.
Maybe commit to writing 500 words per day? That’s what everyone at Inkhaven commits to for the month of November, on pain of getting kicked out. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Beeminder is what the cool rationalists use to do that (when not at Inkhaven). “Safety ropes for slippery slopes”, we call it. See especially the old Beeminder post about ways to automatically send your wordcount to Beeminder.
3. More Beeminder-y tools and integrations
Maybe you’d prefer to commit to spending a certain amount of time, say 15 minutes a day, on writing. At Beeminder we do generally recommend committing to actions rather than outcomes. I’d say either time spent or words written count as actions, but technically if you absolutely can’t think of the next word you want to write, time spent is the only thing fully under your control. But this assumes you’re disciplined enough to stay totally focused on writing during that time. (You could use the stochastic self-sampling time-tracker, TagTime, to ensure you only count time spent actually writing or actively thinking about your prose, but that comes with a whole host of other problems.)
At the other extreme of the action-outcome spectrum would be something like committing to grow your number of subscribers by some amount. Don’t try to beemind that unless you’re a masochist. If you care about subscriber count, commit to corresponding actions like advertising or cross-promotion or whatever.
For beeminding time spent writing, the nerdier among you might like the
WakaTime Beeminder integration.
WakaTime has plugins for pretty much every coding editor.
But maybe even non-nerds should try writing prose in a coding editor.
The AI features are getting frighteningly powerful. [2]
If you don’t like that idea, Beeminder has integrations with other time-tracking tools.
4. Beyond Beeminder
Beeminder isn’t the only game in town for committing to things. There are plenty of Beeminder competitors. Or just use social accountability. Promise friends and family you’ll stick to a publishing schedule. You could even, I don’t know, start a newsletter called AGI Friday so you’re compelled to send something out every Friday.
For more ideas beyond Beeminder, see our post on incentive alignment which generalizes beyond commitment devices to discuss all manner of schemes for aligning your immediate incentives with your longer-term goals.
Footnotes
[1] Or often Wednesday morning because we stupidly have the deadline set to 6am. Now that I say that out loud, let me go change it to something more civilized… Oops, I can’t — Beeminder doesn’t let you tamper with a goal’s deadline when it’s a beemergency. Ok, I’m making a plan-to-forget by setting an alarm for tomorrow. Hand-dusting-emoji.
[2] Speaking of slippery slopes, I’m retracting this for the case of writing in natural language. Too much temptation to let AI put words in your mouth, which we emphatically believe you should never do. There’s a whole discussion of this in the Beeminder forum right now. The “no secret cyborgs” rule, we call it.
