Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and follow them as blogging once did. Newsletter responses are private and one-on-one, rather than conversation. Twitter threads move fast, and quickly disappear beneath the surface.

Patreon, which is probably my favourite platform at the moment, has the drawback of being a walled garden, which means the people who read and comment to you really want to be reading your stuff,, but can’t share content around as easily.

Blog still have some legs as a long-form medium, but there’s a mid-range kind of blogging or journaling that’s largely invisible these days. The kind of content that once used to appear on LiveJournal, where you could just show up and talk about what’s on your mind, without formulating the headings and graphics and calls to action that characterise blogging’s dominant mode here in 2022.

Some of my recent reading led me to think about Facebook as a platform, the whole notion of social media as a hypersigil, and what can be done if you use the platform in ways that run counter to norms and expectations. Which has led to an interesting week of using Facebook as a mid-range blogging platform, doing short-bursts of 300 to 500 words.

Since some of it may be of interest to readers here, I’ve pulled together a curated list of links from the last week below.

Going Full Cyborg

Balancing Work and Publishing

Running Before You Can Walk

Preparing to Go Bigger

Putting Money Where My Mouth Is Around Backlist

There’s no telling how long I’ll do this. At the moment, it’s an interesting diversion while my brain is focused on other things, and I expect the Facebook algorithms are sharing it rather widely because I’ve suddenly gone from avoiding the site to using it rather extensively.

But it has been interesting to write stuff and see folks interact with it, in a way that harkens back to a version of the internet I thought lost over a decade ago.

It doesn’t take much to disrupt a habit once it’s established. Our habitual behaviours are often context specific, triggered to run in response to a particular form of stimuli. Go on a two-week break from work and those routines that run like clockwork go out the window — making it easier to adopt new habits that felt impossible a week before (or lose the thread of good habits that you’d like to keep ) .

Your morning ritual that gets you up, dressed, and out the door can be thrown off by the simple act of leaving your shoes in the wrong place, or running out of shampoo while you’re in the shower. Morning routines are often a chain of habits, each one triggering the next, and one small crack will echo through your morning. Those shoes you left in the wrong spot mean you’re thinking instead of doing, watching the clock to check times and fretting about what needs to be done instead of running through the morning on autopilot. 

Before too long, you’ve walked out the door without your lunch. Or your keys. Or those documents you needed. All because you left your shoes beside the couch, instead of tucking them under your bed. 

Routines get thrown by little things.

Which means unleashing a big change on your life — starting a new job, inviting a partner to cohabitate with you, a major illness — will echo through every habit you’ve built up and disrupt them all. 

The upside: they build fast, and you can connect them to your old habits with a little effort.

The downside: it feels like you’re living in the heart of chaos, and life has spun out of control for a while. Because you’ve got to think and plan to do things again, for the first time in a long while.

And the easiest routines to pick up are usually the ones designed to help you cope and soothe the frustration of all this chaos in your world, rather than the ones that move you forward and thrive in the new normal. 

Rebuilding the useful routines is work, and it pays to do it consciously instead of hoping it’ll come along. 

The negative effects of stress are magnified by a lack of self-efficacy and control. The more you feel like you’re unable to shift the needle in a stressful situation, the faster you inch towards stress induced burn-out.

We often advise new writers to focus on the things you can control. You can’t control whether publishers buy your work, or how many people end up reading your book, but you do have control over how much you write, what sort of stories you tell, how you revise, and how you build up parts of your author platform. You have control over how you respond to setbacks and what ideas you put into the world.

The hardest part is learning to let go of your ambitions, all the big picture hopes and dreams, and narrow your focus on what needs to happen today in order to progress your career forward. Writing 500 words never feels as exciting as releasing a book or getting great reviews, but those small, incremental gains in word count are the minor cogs that keep your entire career running.

Ironically, I’m currently feeling stressed out and more out-of-control than usual. Partially it’s the pandemic, partially it’s stress associated with my day job, and partially it’s a bunch of personal stuff that makes life complicated. There’s very little control, a whole lot of stress, and lots of big-picture ambition with no day-to-day steps to focus on.

It’s time to take a lesson from my writing career and bring my focus down. What small, elementary things do I need to achieve that will have the greatest impact further down the line?