Ray Bradbury once stated, “I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice.”

If you need thousands of hours of practice to become an expert at your craft, then writing every day is the quickest way to start racking up those hours in order to become a master wordsmith.

Writing daily has other benefits besides helping you sharpen your writing skills.

It forces you to clarify your thoughts and arrange them logically. It helps you become a more creative person because you must think up new ideas each day to write about. And, finally, it gives you a constructive way to redeem the time by training you to work productively every day.

Of course, if you’re not used to writing regularly, you’ll probably find it difficult at first. I know I did. I’d make excuses that I didn’t have enough time that day, that I wasn’t inspired, that I had just finished a project and had no idea what to write about next, that I was suffering from an incurable form of writer’s block.

However, these are all bad excuses. Writing every day actually boosts your creativity and helps you overcome writer’s block. Writer’s block is more difficult to beat if you write only sporadically because then writing is unnatural rather than being second nature.

Ultimately, when you start writing every day, eventually it becomes easier and easier to write every day.

Now I make sure to write something every day: it might just be an entry in my journal or it might be several paragraphs of a new article or a new short story.

Here are the seven steps that help me write every day.

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This is a post that I originally shared in 2020 that I’ve updated for 2023. Enjoy!

The new year is right around the corner. If you’re like me, you’re already thinking about goals for the new year and planning out projects you hope to accomplish.

But, it’s worthwhile to take a step back and put these past twelve months in perspective. At the end of each year, I do that by writing up a personal year-end review.

This exercise helps me set myself up for success in January. I reflect over what I achieved during the year, what obstacles I faced, and what lessons I learned. I try to think positively on the past year so I’ll be motivated and inspired as the new one begins.

The insights I gain help me choose my goals for the new year. I’m able to see what worked and what didn’t so I can draw up a plan of action. As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

In today’s blog post, I’m sharing the seven questions from my annual review. Feel free to adapt them as you like — your answers can be a few sentences or several paragraphs long. It’s entirely up to you.

And you can still do this annual review even if December has passed. I usually write it up the last week of December, but I’ve also completed it at the beginning of January.

Let’s dive in.

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