For the month of September I committed to posting a 256 character post to my App.net account every day. It turned out to be more beneficial than being a simple daily nudge.

The Experiment

It was initially an idea by Matt McCabe (@mttmccb) on App.net who was committing to posting a 256 characters post with the hash tag #adn256month included in the post somewhere. It sounded like an interesting challenge, and so I also joined in for the month of September.

I set myself a couple of guidelines at the start of the month for this. A rules of engagement sort of idea.

I didn't include a task in my to-do list for this or even set a reminder. It was the one thing each day that I had to remember to do. I like to think of it as a little mental exercise for the day. Settings reminders and scheduling appointments is great for the really important things, but for little tasks like this, I wanted the responsibility to remember to fall on me.

I limited myself by excluding any tools that would automate any part of the process. Most days I opened Kiwi on my MacBook and composed a post for a few minutes, editing it down to what I needed and then posted it. At the start of the month I did manage to write three posts ahead of their intended days but I stopped doing this as it meant on those days I didn't have too much to do and that seemed to go against the whole reason why I wanted to do this. I wanted to build up a daily habit using only me. No apps, tools, or other medium to remind me or to pull posts from.

My Findings

The month went well. I only missed a single day out of the whole month. I was surprised by this as I thought I would miss at least one a week, and not having an iPhone for the last two weeks I thought I was going to miss even more days. As it turns out I was able to keep the habit going missing just a single day.

The posts themselves started out as mainly random snippets for the first week and then for the remaining three weeks I themed the weekday posts to follow a specific topic. Weeks two and three were about productivity and week four was about Rails development. The weekend posts were usually kept light hearted and not too serious.

The posts also turned out to be great for expanding on ideas for essay posts I have considered but haven't drafted anything for. The chance to write something small on an idea kept me focused on the core idea for the post and also let me test how each post was received by my followers. A favourite or a repost signified that a post might be worth expanding on.

What Next?

The experiment has finished but the idea of the daily post of 256 characters lives on. I've committed to posting a single snippet of 256 characters to App.net on a daily basis using the hash tag #team256.

It's simply too good an exercise not to do on a daily basis. My only concern is that the audience for it is rather small at the moment. I have just over a 100 followers on App.net but I suppose it's better to start somewhere.