Purge your Drafts Folder

One of the hardest things about writing independently on the internet is that you don’t have to do it. You can catch a lightning strike of inspiration for a post, fire up a draft and then edit it until you talk yourself out of it.

Is this post really two posts? Is this something to save for later? How do I make this legible on Twitter?

I’ve struggled deeply with this. I publish solo, but many things I’ve written online have involved friends, business partners, fam, or significant others, giving it a read and saying yay or nay. And even if they say yay, I will hesitate to press the button.

The outcome is that my drafts folder is like an elephant graveyard of ideas and scraps that never made it over the finish line. I joined Medium.com in 2013 and currently have 178 drafts on deck. Substack and Notion have their own folders and maze of half finished thoughts.

Everyone has their own process for publishing. Some are great at volume. Some focus on meatier posts every now and then. I tend to lean more towards the latter but I also want to mix it up.

Which is why I was so excited to see a friend doing a publishing experiment and challenge, “7 posts in 7 days.” The premise is in the title. Publish one post a day for a week. Break your usual writing rhythm with a group and see what happens.

So that’s what I’m publicly committing to now. And instead of new stuff, my goal for this is to take a deep dive into my drafts folder. Air out the stuff that I’ve been sitting on with some reflection on whether or not it holds up.

I’m starting at 2013 and working towards the present. You can think of it as a kind of long overdue spring cleaning. TBD on where it will go, but will post a reflection when it’s all done. To follow along, subscribe below or on Twitter.

Shout out to Jon Bo for launching this project.