A writing PACT

It’s been almost two years since launching this blog. Back then, I used to write very frequently on here¹.

But since then, that habit of writing daily has faded quite a bit. And especially lately, my brain felt very scattered across different things that are very important to me when it comes to creating and learning: Building Billow at my day job, being a good student at University and working on my own projects like Morgenblau or Kai.

But I also noticed that these three things have a particular “seriousness” to them that often makes it harder for me to start working on them day to day.

I need something right now that I can do regularly that still feels fun and fulfilling, while not being so cognitively demanding. I love programming and especially in this day and age with all the possibilities we have, it is more fun than ever. But despite what all the Vibe Coding gurus say, real engineering and programming can’t be done on autopilot. I notice this every day: Crafting something truly great is still hard.

Writing on the other hand, when done right and under the right circumstances, never really feels hard to me. It’s more like structured thinking and I always feel better after having written something. Not tired but happy.

That’s why I’m borrowing Anne-Laure’s concept of a PACT². Doing something purposeful, that’s actionable, can be done continuously and is trackable.

Worded in the suggested format, my PACT is:

I will publish a post daily on this blog for the next 30 days

No other real rules besides that. Posts can be long or short, sometimes structured, sometimes not. But always something that’s on my mind when I sit down to write. And I’ll try to make the posts atomic: Just one core idea to explore, not trying to do too much.

One inspiration for this challenge that I want to name here is Robert with his personal blog. He publishes a post (almost) daily and it’s probably the only blog with such a high post frequency that I practically read every day. My guess is that it’s because his posts a) always have a consistently manageable length, b) feel very personal and c) most of the time tie back to a topic I’m passionate about like blogging or living a simpler life.

So yeah, my timer for 15 minutes just went off so I guess it’s time to not overthink it and just get this post out now.

See you tomorrow :)