Reverb 10's over, now what?

I need to write more than I do now. I've written various things on the internet over the past 15 years, but I really start to feel like Twitter causes this odd decay in the long-form. It goes a little something like "rather than bang out a blog post, half of which is nonsense, why not just cut out the good stuff and post the nonsense straight to Twitter." Not that it's actually a pre-conceived notion, but you get the idea. And that's exactly what it turns into. Nonsense on Twitter.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter's been a valuable asset, and I probably spend more time using it than anything else in my digital life. I check it in the morning as I'm getting up, during the day and at night before I go to bed. It's where I most often learn of breaking news, and also interact with a core group of friends.

But Reverb 10 really helped me to focus on some things to write, drove a fair amount of traffic here via the hashtag and got a lot of complements. And really made me feel good about long form writing.

So what's next? I don't really think I could keep up the pace of a daily prompt (a quick Google search turns up several of them), but I do want to write more here. Perhaps I will come up with my own writing schedule and map out some things I want to write about. I don't just want this to be a "what I did blog", because frankly, I doubt many of you want to read about changing poopy diapers and I already have a blog that I should be writing in for my daughter.

Anybody have any other ideas for what keeps you motivated to keep writing?

Reverb 10 - Day 2 - Writing

December 2 Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

The question for me should probably be "What don't I do?" I have many habits that contribute to not writing as often as I'd like to. I used to be a more prolific writer in various forums around the internet, mostly in my personal blog. I've never been much of a public blogger. Now, it's often an afterthought, or really only utilized when I feel particularly strongly about something. This is due to a number of factors, which I explain below.

What can I do to eliminate?

Avoid distractions - television, Twitter, Facebook, other mindless activities. While I do enjoy all of these things, they get in the way of writing, sometimes to the detriment of my sanity (I subscribe to the theory that writing as therapy). Twitter is very addictive, but it can really be at the detriment of the longer form. 140 characters is good for a lot of things, but it's also not good for a lot of things.

Stop procrastinating - I am a gigantic procrastinator in a lot of things I do, both at work and at home. This causes way more time to be taken on certain activities then really should be.

Stay focused - environmental degradation (ED) is what I call what has happened to us to just about all of us on a daily basis. Beeping mobile devices, blaring televisions, blinking computer screens, ringing telephones. These are all detractors. I want to take several hours a week with as little ED as possible to read, write, and reflect. It's very important. It's hard to do when you're trying to blog, because all of that stuff is right there on the computer as you are writing.