What is a habit anyway?  The implication is that it’s something that you do automatically, without thinking.  Something that would be difficult to stop doing, even if you wanted to.  But the point of writing every day is to get out of the “automatic” kind of thinking that habits are made out of.  It requires a bit of brute force to write 750 words, and it’s not something that you just do… it has to be intentional every time, and that’s the magic of it, I think.

So, I can’t say that writing every day is a habit, even after 100 days.  It is a proof of concept for me, really.  The point of building this website was to build something truly useful, something that helped me (and others) tap into the subconscious area of my/their brain, to dig up thoughts that rarely saw the light of day.  To complete incomplete thoughts.  Close old loops of the brain that have been unresolved.  Really get to the bottom of things.  Because I strive to be at the bottom of things.

Writing 750 words is like swimming to the bottom of a swimming pool.  It takes a bit of effort but you can get there, no problem.  And there’s a certain perspective at the bottom of the pool that you can’t really get anywhere else in or out of the pool.  Of course, you can’t stay there, you can’t just keep writing 30 words a minute for the entire day, you’ll run out of breath.  Eventually you have to go back to the surface and take a breath.  But maybe the quality of that breath will also have something unique about it.  A bit of the bottom of the pool in it.  And who knows how long that lasts, before the above water world sinks in and it’s difficult to remember exactly what was so neat about the bottom of the pool.  But then, you do it again the next day, and the next and the next, and 100 days later the two worlds begin to blend together.  You can summon the feeling of clarity of thought while above water, and you can think about the above water world even while down at the bottom of the pool.  There’s a permeability about it, of worlds fusing together, where complex thoughts and a zillion distractions can live side by side.  That’s my top-of-the-head metaphor for the value of daily private writing.

I had a feeling about it when I started this project, but of course there are a million feelings about a million things that end up not being true.  The only way to know if a feeling is right is to follow it to the end of its rope.  If I can continue writing 750 words a day for 100 days, or 365 days, of 10 years, or the rest of my life, then I will be able to tell whether or not there is value in doing it.

I’ve gotten a lot of amazing feedback from people too.  As of last night, 99 other people are on streaks of 30 days or more.  That’s pretty amazing to me, that others are as into this as I am.  To see that many people also being able to find the drive and motivation to start a new daily habit is something that I didn’t expect.  I’m a bit of a challenge junkie, if you know me, so it made sense that I’d be able to do it, but these 99 others are people who I don’t even know, and haven’t really had to pitch the idea to.  I think that’s awesome, anyway.

Since starting the project at the beginning of the year, over 18,000 people have logged in to the site to write 750 words.  Over 46,000 days have been completed… meaning that there are over 46,000 days of 750 words or more.  41,819,906 words have been written.

The project is also being sustained by the good will of its members through an idea I called Patronage.  I suggest a monthly donation of $3-4, but don’t require it.  Each month of Patronage earns the user the ability to write a note on the site (the only publicly viewable user content on the site) either as a testimonial, a feature request, a self-promotional note about something they think others would like, an incentive to complete the monthly challenge, or a request to send a larger portion of the monthly patronage to our local charity, 826 Seattle.  Even though there are almost no social networking features on the site, a sense of community is emerging from the people who are on the site, and it’s one of the things I’m most excited to explore in the future.  The irony of creating a community out of a site dedicated to private journaling is not lost on me.

In any case, I’m over my 750 words now and am curious to see if my new Pheonix badge is visible from the stats page.  Who’s going to be the next one to make it to 100 days in a row?

So, instead of requiring payment, or just asking for donations, I wanted to make the support and good will of the people using the site as much of a feature as the act of daily writing.

It’s easier to just link to it than to explain it, so this is what I came up with:

http://750words.com/patrons

It’s still in flux, so let me know what you think about it.

I like friendly competition. I told Alexander that he’s allowed to adapt or improve on any features that he things Penzu would also benefit from. The act of private journaling isn’t something I want to own… the more people that build tools for it, the better, in my opinion.  And I also believe having someone who’s working on the same stuff as you and keeping you on your toes is good for everyone involved.  Of course, they’re a lot bigger than I am, but that’s good because I’m not ready to move servers again.

Anyway, it’s just a test in keeping things sustainable.  Curious to hear what other people think.

In my wanderings I’ve found two other great private journaling tools that I want to tell you about in case they are exactly what you’re looking for.  It doesn’t matter to me which one you like best!

Ommwriter

Ommwriter is a beautiful Mac application.  It is an immersive that takes your full screen and your full attention.  It has subtle imagery, sounds, and effects to help tame the wild monkey of your attention and to just write.  It’s like a log cabin in the woods without the log cabin and the woods.

Pros:

• It’s got an immersive quality to it that I haven’t seen attempted by anyone else.  You really have to try it to know what I mean.
• It stores all your writing on your computer.  No need to export or fear privacy of your writing.
• It’s free.

Cons:

• Mac only.  Well, that’s actually a pro in wolf’s clothing if you ask me.
• If you don’t always do your writing on your own computer, your writing might get fragmented.
• No password protection or other kinds of security to keep your pesky roommates or others from digging through your writing.

I like the way that it takes the writing environment as seriously as it does.  I’m jealous that they can pull off a full screen mode that web apps can’t do (at least, not without the help of Plainview).  It feels like such a strong writing tool that I downloaded it and then tried to think of a good reason to work on a new novel.

The creators of this app are blogging and Twittering about their features pretty frequently, and it seems like they’re well on their way to growing the product.

Penzu

Penzu is also awesome in its own right.  They’ve hit a home run on one feature in particular: post encryption and security.

At first glance they have a lot of similar features as 750 Words: auto-opening a page to write on (they don’t even require an account), auto-saving, auto-scrolling of the page when you get to the bottom.  And then they’ve got a lot of features that I don’t have: multiple entries per day, public entries, attaching photos, and a Pro version that gives you extra security, a rich text editing option, and other advanced features.  I was most impressed, however, with their security… you can set a password on each entry that double encrypts your entry with an encrypted version of your password and is basically permanently irretrievable without that password.  And of course there’s no password recovery option because the entry itself is encrypted with the password.  It’s pretty impressive and definitely the place that I send people who want to be absolutely sure that their secrets never ever see the light of day.  I am going to implement my own encryption as well, but because of my desire to be able to parse and analyze text I most likely won’t ever go the full route of 1-way encryption.

Pros:

• Very secure.
• Easy to use.
• The Pro version is well-priced and offers about all the features you could possibly ever need if you wanted to write a private journal.
• Free.

Cons:

• I think they’re trying to differentiate themselves on the private journaling front, and yet they offer lots of ways to make your entries public, to share them, etc.  It seems to dilute the purpose of the site a little.

They’re also very active bloggers and Twitters and seem to be doing a great job of making a business out of private journaling.  They seem very responsive and friendly to everyone who writes to or about them on Twitter.

But does it beat a physical notebook?

It’s difficult to beat the notebook on aesthetics and ease of use.  That said, I think the two options above are significantly better than writing in a physical journal: Ommwriter because it doesn’t require you to scrawl in your ugly handwriting and come up with your own writing mood music, Penzu because it’s super secure and free (even a notebook costs money).

The important thing in all of this is that the fruits of private writing are only as good as the fruits of the writing that you do and the insights and self-knowledge that come from that.  The tools might kick you in the right direction, but ultimately I’d recommend using whatever tool resonates with you most, and gets out of the way and lets you just do your writing.

That said, the most important aspect of private journaling is feeling safe in the environment that you do your writing.  It’s important that you aren’t paranoid of people finding your words (either because of secrets or maybe just the sheer pettiness of your thoughts (if you’re anything like me)), and trust that you can really dump it all out.  In my experience it’s only then that you really get the full reward that private journaling promises.  Once that’s achieved, I think it can really improve your life in a noticeable way.

And now recently I’ve been obsessed with the idea of private journaling.  Mostly because I think the habit of writing privately is something that the world of social networking addicts is sorely missing.  Our brains need time alone to spin and process and create meaning in our lives, unattached from the pressures of the world.  The content of a private journal… personal thoughts, the makings of true introspection, unfiltered fears, desires, subconscious bubblings-up… are perhaps the richest soil of our selves outside our neurons themselves.

Because of the magic of technology, we can in many ways strain information out of the unfiltered words of our stream-of-conscious thoughts.

I’m beginning to explore all of the ins and outs of this data on this new Explore page.  But I’m trying to think of more… if anyone can think of other ways to harvest information out of text, I would love to hear about it.

From what I can tell, the Primary category is for very physical, basic, almost animalistic concepts, sensations, instincts, and passions.  The Emotional category is for the emotions of course, but more like the moods that we go through throughout the day rather than the initial reactions to everything.  And Secondary is all about rationality, thought, cognition, abstract thinking, etc.

It takes a text file of any sort and parses out the words to figure out which categories (and the magic comes from the subcategories, like Icarian Imagery), the text is heaviest in.

You end up with percentages of the top level Primary, Emotional, and Secondary categories, but you also get a lot of information about how the text scored in all of the subcategories.

A few of my favorite subcategories include:

• Primary -> Need -> Sex
• Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Timelessness
• Primary -> Rare Knowledge -> Icarian Imagery
• Secondary -> Moral Imperative
• Emotion -> Anxiety
• Emotion -> Glory

Someone was even helpful enough to port the script to Ruby. I’ve got a plan to put this into use on 750words.com in the next couple days.  It’s gonna be pretty awesome, I think.

1. Search – you can now search your writing in case you want to go back and find something you wrote about on some other day.
2. Export – you can export your daily writings by month.
3. General stats
   1. Timer – You can see how long, on average, it takes you to write 750 words during a given month period.
   2. Speedometer – You can see how many words per minute you write, on average, to get to 750 words
   3. Streaks – you can see how many days in a row you’ve completed your 750 words
   4. Scoreboards per month – go back and see who won on any month that you did some writing
4. Customize – you can change the font color, font size, font family, and background color of the writing page to suit your aesthetics
5. Extra point for writing in one sitting – added an extra bonus point if you finish your daily writing in one sitting in less that 30 minutes
6. Last 10 completed pages – you can see who the last 10 people to complete their pages were, and how long it took them.
7. Tab – you can now tab from within the textarea that you’re writing, in case you want to indent or format lists that you’re writing.  All these little tweaks that make it feel more like a real writing tool are super interesting to me.

This is a silly project, but I’m finding that it does have a noticeable effect on my mental state and productivity (on things other than working on this project) when I’ve done my daily writing.  Which is why I guess I’ve been doing it on and off for 4 years, when I needed some forced brain purging.

Anyway, I’m getting a kick out of this.  I hope you do too!

The site’s called 750 Words, and the premise is simple, to write 750 words a day. 750 private, unfiltered, unplanned, words full of tangents, spelling mistakes, inconsistencies, repetitions, lost trains of thought, etc.  It was highly inspired by a thing called Morning Pages from The Artist’s Way (read a PDF excerpt of the Morning Pages passage here.)

I think this kind of writing is different from the kind of writing that we’re doing more and more of on the internet.  Different not only in audience (yourself instead of someone else) but also in character.

I think public, edited, thoughtful writing is self-expressive in nature.  It condenses ideas, it summarizes thoughts, it explains complications, it offers opinions.  It takes the world and creates a lens that you can see it through.

Not so with private, unfiltered, unplanned writing.  This kind of writing is entirely different.  It’s self-investigative in nature. It opens up messy drawers of thought and lays everything out on the table, it takes a 99% completed thought and tears it apart into its inconsistencies. It is short on manners, etiquette and practicalities.  It dismisses entirely valid trains of thought for no reason, and dwells on nit-picky details that seem to be entirely solid.

We need both kinds of writing. They go well together. The private writing becomes fodder for later public writing. Just like our secret inner thoughts are fodder for our more simplified public personas.

Of course, writing used to be private by default. The entire world couldn’t read the notebook in the bottom desk drawer. But they could read that blog post that had as as little thought put into it.  But, after 10 years plus of writing online, and going through the first dozen major lessons of writing online, I feel like I’ve slowly edited out the crazy spontaneous and unruly voice of my subconscious from my writing. And, through neglect, I’ve slowly given it less and less attention, all the while hoping that it would produce the same gems of thought and creativity that it had back when it was given more fuel.

So, 750 Words. Yes, online, because that’s the only way I can write anymore, given that I’m on any of 3 or 4 different computers at a given time.  And because my hand has forgotten how to write long hand.  But, private.  Because it’s more about writing than reading, I’ve used a few tricks to make the writing process more enjoyable:

• Break open the text box. Let it take over the whole page, like a Word document sorta, but I like to think of it more like a typewriter.  The page automatically scrolls as you get near the bottom of the page.
• Let it auto-save. No need for a save button… you didn’t need one in you paper journal, why do you need one online?
• Count the words. Paper has a size, the internet page doesn’t. So, count the words, and know when you’ve gotten to 3 pages (the magic number).
• One entry per day… no need to title it, tag it, open it, close it, categorize it, preview it, post it, date it, or anything. One entry a day, no more no less.
• Motivate. We all need motivation, even for things that we want to do.  Even more so for things that we know are good for us, but that take work. So I added a bowling-inspired point system that rewards writing several days in a row, but not so much that it breaks your heart if you miss a day. 3 days in a row is a turkey.

I’ve been doing my version of 750 words in a private wiki for the last year… and at current count only wrote on 81 of the last 300 days.  Even that has been a great benefit to me though.  I hope to continue the practice for the foreseeable future, as long as it continues to benefit my days.

I thought of building this little tool (let me check my wiki) on December 11th. I was still thinking (and writing) about it on December 12th, so I bought the domain.  On December 13th I used one of my stub Rails site bundles to get the basics up and running (Facebook Connect, jQuery, Compass) on my shared server, created a few models, and looked up a few jQuery plugins I’d need.  Tested it on December 14th, launched on December 15th.  When the idea’s there, and the tools are there, things can happen fast.  But having those 1.5 days to brainstorm about it before taking action were what really made it happen and made me confident that I could build it without distracting too much from my other work.

Anyway, I’m going to use it. If anyone else finds it useful, that’s great! I’d love to hear any feedback that people have, too.