This will sound ridiculously small an act, but I’ve been doing this for years now (a decade?) and it seems to help. I have a Base-Lock Rubber Type kit with tiny letters (think linotype) and on one line I keep the word “write.” I keep a paper planner, and each year, at the start of the year, I get out the stamp pad (some years black, some years purple, with no apparent logic) and stamp that word on each square in the planner, so the word “write” accosts me every day. (It helps that this planner is the way I keep track of everything, and yes, I’m still wed to paper. And yes, I spilled water on it one year and it was sobering, but because I usually use pencil, it was not as devastating as it might have been.) Each day that I write something, I check off the word “write.” Each day that I don’t, I draw a line through it. There are plenty of lapses, days at a time when I haven’t checked off the word, but somehow this small practice keeps me accountable to myself. And when it happens, it feels really good to have a week with more checks than lines marked through. (For all of us, may there be many more such weeks, this year and beyond.)
