750 Words is one of two gamification programs I’m initiating this week. The concept is based off “morning pages” - where one writes roughly 3 pages on any subject without heavily editing yourself.

Morning pages are used to get thoughts flowing, to get the process of writing more and more a habitual thing rather than something that only comes when the mood strikes. Often times it’s the first step - just starting to write - that writers have difficulty with. Morning pages attack the problem of perfectionism - the idea that words first written down on a page have to be perfect rather than ones that can be edited later - and therefore help out with procrastination and writer’s block.

And I have all these problems.

I’ve used this with success in the past when I had a particularly bad case of writer’s block. Its something I wanted to do for a while to help out with work and help out with having more output.

750 words gamifies morning pages by making it into a scorecard similar to bowling. You get different badges as you go along, a visual record of progress, the ability to share on sites like facebook, and group challenges.

I ramped up using this program last week, but I’m doing a hard start this week.

Author Timothy Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef) at the 5:06 mark talks about how in daily tasks, lowering quotas allows you to achieve higher productivity. Lowered quotas help lower the inertia of starting tasks, which can be particularly difficult to overcome if you don’t really like the task.

His example is writing, which I personally hate doing in a systematic way. He mentions a particularly prolific friend who would consider the day a win if he produced “two shitty pages.” This is great, because often times it’s just the process of getting through that is difficult - we tend to want to edit as we are writing instead of after the fact. Perfectionism sounds great, but can be debilitating in terms of habituation. This mentality negates the need for perfection.

Programs like NaNoWriMo are particularly successful because they advocate the process of just getting the words onto the page whether they are good or not. Editing comes later, but is less psychologically debilitating than having to write words that need to perfect from the start.

The program I’m fiddling around with now, 750words, advocates the same thing in the form of “morning pages” - a practice that can equally be used for professional writing or to break out of writer’s block.

I’ve noticed that with most of my writing, it’s the act of just getting started that takes forever.

750words and "Morning Pages" for Writing

"2 Shitty Pages" - Tim Ferriss on Lowered Quotas and Efficiency