Writing April 2026

Inkhaven 2 is starting, which means it’s time for another writing challenge!
The first one was incredibly helpful, although it mostly resulted in personal writing (in part bc I didn’t feel comfortable w anything more public than a message sent to one person, in part because snvr didn’t exist yet), the things that are public so far are here.

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# Preliminary Approach Intention: write ~daily for the month of April Rules: `2` posts/week, no spillover `15` mins/day, capped spillover (ratchet to max 3 safe days) Costs: `5`€/failure, +`5`€ after each `2` failures, no cap

Notes:
I’m keeping posts/week low for now in case I want to do more personal writing (which counts against the mins/day, but not against the posts/week). Will re-evaluate this later, but I have more than enough ideas already.
Forgetting to track the time means guessing very conservatively, at most x.

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Additional Info

FAQ (hmm, no one’s really asked those Qs, let alone frequently, but they’re the questions I’ve thought about) QITA

Why set it up so loosely?
Bc I’d rather have this as a mini-theme¹ on writing, rather than trying to define it incredibly rigidly now, then notice I would much rather do it differently but now have to do it this specific way and then only do that one half-heartedly and then potentially be annoyed/demotivated enough to not do the other, better thing anymore.
This way I can follow the theme and general intend of writing more, without it being so strict as that I might get internally misaligned, as well as being able to adjust to situations, circumstances, sparks and inspirations, etc.

Why not give the bee more sting?
In part bc themes, in part bc I’m already quite averse to both losing 5€ and failing beeminder. I have failed sometimes on beeminder but I don’t want it to become too regular. But also, my psychology immediately goes “if we lose the 5€ a bunch of times, that doesn’t just add up, but desensitises, which means we gotta increase to 10€, then 20€, 40€, etc. until so much money is on the line each day that it would be terrible to lose it. But by then we already lost way more money than that! So, to not lose all this money, might as well not want to fail now already” and this (automatic chain of thoughts) actually works in motivating me.
I could get more motivation through setting up higher stakes, but I’ve not been desperate enough w any goal as that that felt necessary?

Methodology

OK, how to define goals, targets, and measurables for this one?

• x words/day written is good but incentivizes doing quick writing over researched stuff
• x posts per time-unit are even worse
  • if the time units are large (e.g. x posts/week or /month) then it could lead to build-up, which is undesirable
  • advantage of those is that a day full of ideas and drive is more incentivized to be used (until x is reached)
• time spent might lead to few posts bc 1 post/week that had lots of research time in it. Seems fine, but what counts as research?
  • thinking about it w obsidian open or actually researching stuff specifically for the post: yes
  • taking a walk and thinking about the post: no (unless the target is smth like 2h/day, then it seems fine)

Should anything in excess of x be allowed to spill over? how much?

• spillover allows for days that are good for writing to really be utilized for it (i.e. like “large x per large time unit”)
• but spillover makes things less predictable:
  • if target is set too low, steamrolling through a weeks worth of it could happen repeatedly, either turning the challenge from “daily writing” into “once a week writing” or just have it end much earlier. this doesn’t happen without spillover
  • capped spillover prevents this form getting too out of control
  • alternative is to set very high target, which might violate future preferences if the shape of the month (and future preferences) is not yet clear

Maybe a hybrid approach:

• x mins/day, no spillover; y posts/week with spillover
  • guarantees daily writing, but to not become too annoying, x would have to be fairly low
  • capped spillover for x is more lenient
• y posts/week, no spillover; x mins/day with spillover
  • guarantees minimum amount of of posts/week
  • x might or might not be a binding constraint
    • i.e. writing all y posts in 7x minutes in one day is still possible
  • x with capped spillover prevents this
• capped spillover on writing-time means that there will be untracked time OR official and unofficial time, which is not great; if I track the time I spend on this, I might as well know the real amount, not the minimum
  • capping leeway instead (in beeminder) would solve this; just have to ratchet back when leeway is exceeded by ≥1
  • alternative: x writing days/week; this is easy to track even on paper, but I think I’d like to see the time units go up on a graph…

Writing November 2025

The first writing month challenge started during Inkhaven but was mainly focused on personal writing.
The challenge was to write for at least 10mins per day, with up to 12mins/day could get tracked. Anything above wouldn’t count towards future days, which means that consistently doing 12mins+/day yields 1 “free” day every 5 days. The only exception was if I knew I would have a particularly tough day coming up tomorrow, I could invoke an exception where I can do 12 extra mins now to skip the next days 10 mins. This should be invoked only as exceptions.

Apart from the official (10-12mins/day) log…

I also tracked the actual minutes in a separate, non-punishing beeminder, just to have a graph for that as well:

Some point in December I stopped tracking bc it does get tedious

Footnotes

1. like in CGP Grey’s Theme System ↩