A failure
In 2019 I decided to write technical notes every day. Set the goal, made the plan, bought the tools.
Twenty-three days.
Day twenty-four I worked until eleven, thought "not today", and there was never a day twenty-five.
The retrospective
Looking back, every one of those twenty-three days involved the same sequence: sit down, open the tool, think about what to write, realise there is nothing, force out a paragraph, decide it is bad, delete, start over. Forty minutes minimum, usually worse.
I was not failing at consistency. I was failing at volume — one contribution per day from an empty tank.
What changed
Now I write in batches, and only when something genuinely annoyed me: a bug that took three hours, a design decision that turned out wrong. Those notes take six minutes because the material already exists.
Twenty-three days of forced writing produced nothing worth reading. Two years of infrequent writing produced posts people actually email me about.
Revised understanding
What I used to call persistence was really the ability to endure something unpleasant. What survives is different: it is the stuff that does not require endurance.
If a habit needs willpower every single time, the habit is badly designed, not the person.
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