Will This Hold Me Accountable?
a newsletter that forces me to write (but doesn't force you to read)
“Accountability makes me productive,” I whisper to myself in the morning after turning off my alarm for the fifth time. It’s 10:30am, which means I’m already three hours behind the schedule I’ve set for myself:
7:15 — First Alarm
7:45 — Second Alarm
7:59 — Need to be up by now because at
8:00 — i’m supposed to be making breakfast and at
9:00 — i should be showering so then at
10:00 — i can start work, but none of this actually happened so at
10:30 — my entire day is now completely fucked.
“Accountability makes me productive,” I whisper to myself.
For the past few months, I’ve been struggling to figure out exactly what “accountability” even means when I can’t even wake up after an alarm. It doesn’t involve any sort of internal motivation, that is for sure. Even external motivation, such as the desire for other people to read my work, can fall flat. I have a blog that’s been devoid of content for months because, as evidenced above, I do not know how to set and follow schedules.
There’s something different about a newsletter. For one, I don’t have to worry about keeping a well-designed blog — I just have to know when to put in a paragraph break occasionally. My editorial calendar is the simplest it has ever been, as long as I’m putting out a newsletter every week, I’m golden. And while there is a slight chance I gain thousands of followers from this rambling set of words and musings I put out every week, the truth is that barely anybody is going to be reading this, which means I can create run-on sentences to my heart’s galore, and maybe even messs up spelin som werds or too.
With the newsletters I subscribe to, I always know when to expect ramblings from writers I like and follow at a certain day every week. What if I could ask myself to hold the same sort of standards that I do for these people I follow?
“Accountability makes me productive,” I whisper, smiling as I type the last few words of this first newsletter, completely ignoring the fact that I have no idea what I’ll be writing in this next week.
In the meantime, tell your friends!