What is No Look November
No Look November is the creation of Emilia Gardner the well known Blogger and Youtuber. It means not checking your website traffic stats for a month.
Many people get a feeling of a ‘high’ when things are going well and are drawn in to checking constantly. They then get negative feelings of low morale or esteem if things are not so ‘up’ that day.
So, this is an attempt to manage or mitigate an addiction to constant checking .
Emilia has invited participants and viewers of her live stream audience to join her in this.
What I’m going to do
I hope that I can be forgiven for taking the ‘No Look November’ concept and adapting it to where I am at the moment.
In order to build a consistent writing habit, I’ve vowed to not look at ANYTHING during the day prior to completing a period of writing.
That means not looking at email, the news, Instagram, and, definitely not YouTube until I have spent in aggregate at least 120 minutes writing.
Writing means literally writing paragraph content. It doesn’t include; outlining, headlines, research, editing, formatting, or posting. Just plain old first draft of paragraph text.
Its inevitable that there will be ‘screen breaks’ along the way. That’s OK so long as there are no diversions introduced during those breaks.
I will be using a timer. To start with I’ll measure my activity in 10 minute blocks.
I’ve already found that a variation of the Pomodoro method can be helpful for applying yourself to a task.
I also think that recording my activity every 10 minutes may be an important device. It offers the possibility to bring little packets of satisfaction.
I’ll let you know how that goes.
Each day I’m going to devote 120 minutes to actual writing time BEFORE I do anything else.
Why I’m doing it
Its time that I developed a consistent writing habit. There is no mystery involved. Its just something that we all need to do as writers.
The issue has been that not only am I easily distracted directly when looking at things, but once I look at something interesting the thoughts continue to work in my head. It seems that I can’t help coming up with more good ideas.
However, if I already know what I need to write then I don’t need any further input at that stage.
New input becomes a distraction and / or an unwelcome mental load.
I’ve found it best to write when my head is clear and has had little to no prior input that day.
And so when I heard Emilia talk of ‘No Look November’ I thought that that would be a good frame on which to build a no distraction approach to writing.
The interesting creative stuff can all happen later in the day.
Here is the short video I made about all this
This morning I got up early to make this video. I expected good weather for a sunrise. A bit of cloud, but not too much.
I left the house just after 5am to make the journey to a good location down by Sydney Harbour. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t turn out well. There was just too much cloud. So, I never saw the sunrise itself. It just got light.
No matter. There is no prediction only forecast. You have to give it a go when conditions look good or it will never happen.
It a bit like blogging. Just keep doing it and one day it will bear fruit.
Finally
To wrap up I don’t expect to do this literally every day of the week. But those days that are writing days…. say 5 per week, this is the way that they will go.
I’m interested to see how well I can exercise that muscle and build a sustainable writing habit.