After an extended break from being online due to family commitments, I was finding it hard to return to regular online posting. The routine was just not there, and I wasn’t finding the oomph inside myself. The answer was to look for outside motivation. I remembered reading a post and watching a vid by Niall Doherty, an adventurer who is travelling the world without flying, and Niall’s suggestion for sticking to long term small increment plans seemed particularly appropriate.

Niall suggests three steps in his Holy Trinity of Productivity blog post: setting a small daily target, making sure you are accountable to someone else, and establishing a harsh penalty for not meeting the daily target.

So, I have now bet Ju Landéesse, who is my manager and web person, that I will produce a tweet and a Facebook post every single day. If I don’t send Ju this content daily, then I have to pay Ju $1000. That’s a ridiculously large amount of money.

The rationale is that, no matter how distracted or busy I am, I am always going to prefer to write the content for my Facebook and Twitter than I am to lose the bet.

The irony of having to find a way to maneuver myself into writing a couple of hundred words of text a day, when I willingly write several thousand words of fiction in a sitting, is not lost on me!

I recommend having a look around Niall Doherty’s site, Disrupting the Rabblement. I stumbled on to Niall’s writing when looking for material on minimalist travel a couple of years ago, and have kept on reading his mix of travelogue, entrepreneurial experimentation and introspection.