Failure

I stayed up late last night and assumed I could get up early enough in the morning to write a post before my new deadline. Unfortunately, I didn't do that, so I failed. I am moderately concerned by the significant uptick in my failure rate (around one per month up to around one per week in the last month), but I think I can mostly attribute that to increasingly strict standards around posting. I expect that I will fail less often as I become accustomed to those standards, but that won't happen unless I actually make adjustments in order to meet them.

This and many earlier failures seem to have late nights in common. I think this is partly because the natural final failure is running out of time, but also because my willpower is weaker at the end of the day and at the same time my reasoning is most impaired. Those together mean it's more likely that I'll think something silly like "I'll write this tomorrow morning" when tomorrow morning is not very many hours away. Actually, aiming to write in the morning in general may be the solution here, if it's the morning at the start of my day-long window instead of at the end.

I also can't help but notice that many of my failures seem to happen on weekends. I assume that is at least partly because I tend to relax more on weekends which means there's less structure to fit the writing into, but also social demands on my time are higher and I tend to not be in a very productive frame of mind. Being aware of this should help, but if not I might try giving myself a day off by pre-writing an extra post on whichever weekday has the most time.