SELECTION: 750 words per day. Getting experience

This post was written by one of the candidates for authorship in Lifehacker Dmitry Sinko. It depends only on how much you like the material, whether he will write to our blog. You can express your gratitude by clicking one or more social sharing buttons or by writing your thoughts in the comments.

Everyone at least once had the thought "Could I write a book?" in their head. If you like to read, for example, about-everything.wiki :), then you probably thought about starting writing more than once or even started. I, like all novice authors, faced a whole bunch of problems. One of them is the fear of the reader, in the spirit of "I wrote this here, what will they think of me?". In order to stretch myself a little and weaken the complexes given to me by nature, I, as always, decided to Google special magical techniques that solve all problems. Soon I came across an interesting and at the same time elementary technique, it is called “750 words a day”.

This is a very simple technique that novice bloggers and journalists like to use. The roots of this method rest on the simple, like a cork, truth: “In order to do something well, you need to do it all the time.”

So, 750 words a day. It doesn't matter what it is. A story, personal problems, a letter to a friend, an article or just a description of events. The main thing is that you write at least 750 words every day. Regardless of the topic you choose. Over time, quantity will turn into quality.

Everything seems to be simple, but there is one catch — laziness (how can it be without it?). If we can't do something, we won't :). So, in order to start and, most importantly, not to quit writing every single day, we created a service 750words.com . All entries are closed, no one but you will be able to read them. Apparently, we are being offered a complete analogue of a personal diary. So why is it needed at all then?

The main "chips" 750words.com :

1. Simple and intuitive interface. Facebook OpenID registration is not required, we log in via facebook*/google/yahoo/openid. The editor is very simple, if not poor. Text on a white background. What else do we need?

2. Motivation. Every day you will receive an annoying notification: "We know you haven't written anything yet." You can turn it off, but then a good half of all the goodies will go to waste.

In addition to this, the service saves the history of notes and crosses out the days when we wrote. For each written text, we are given points and rewards. A user rating table is being built daily, where you can immediately see who has messed up. Marathons are held periodically: who will last longer and will not miss a single day. Usually less than half survive :), that's why he's a marathon. The results are sent to the mail every day and are available on the website.

This is how the user profile looks like:

3. Statistics. The service counts how many days you wrote, how many days you spat at the ceiling, the number of words written and other vital things.

For English-speaking users, the service indexes the text and draws conclusions about a person's mood, highlights topics of concern to him. There is also a killer function — using metadata. You can specify directly in the text:

Stress: 9
Sleep: 5
Work:10

750words will automatically process this data and build graphs (based on the number of points you specified). Thus, you can keep a “log” of any parameters of your life and observe your personal growth (or degradation :).

Unfortunately, I couldn't check how this system works with the Russian language, since they need time to compile statistics. If you are interested and decided to try — share your observations. I think everyone will be interested.

This is how statistics on user records look like.

If you are as paranoid as I am and don't trust anyone but yourself and your pet, you can use any other tool: evernote (we use built-in encryption), gmail, notepad, notebook, even ordinary napkins. The main thing is to write.

Do you know other ways to develop “writing talent"?

*Activity of Meta Platforms Inc. and its social networks Facebook and Instagram is prohibited in the territory of the Russian Federation.