July 25, 2026

Tin Year Anniversary

Tomorrow is the 10-year anniversary of this here mailing list.

According to the interwebs, the traditional gift for one’s decennial anniversary is tin, which, if you ask me, is pretty freaking lame.

Anyways...

I don’t typically celebrate arbitrary date-based milestones (prolly cuz my birthday is a few days before Christmas), but a decade of daily writing was enough of a big deal to me that I decided to check and see just how “daily” it was...

Here’s what I found:

So yeah...

I’ve missed 25 days in 10 years.

In 2016, I started mid-year and was just getting into the swing of daily writing, so I missed the most days (percentage-wise, since it was only half a year).

2017 wasn’t much better in terms of daily-ness, but my actual writing skills got noticeably better IMHO.

2018-2023: I had apparently found my groove and was reliably cranking out an email pretty much every day.

Then in 2024, I fell off the wagon in a big way, missing 6 days. Why? Pneumonia.

2025: I got right back on the email horse and delivered a solid daily cadence of messages.

So far, 2026 has also been very steady, but I have noticed some interesting changes in my routine this year.

For example, I find myself being a little more “batch-y” than I have been in the past, and it can be a bit problematic.

Here’s what happens:

I’ll write an email, and then immediately know what the next one should be, and so I’ll write that one too.

And then it might happen a third time, so I write that one, too.

So since I have three days’ worth of stuff, I’ll schedule them all to go out, and I won’t have to write for a few days.

But then I’m out of the daily writing habit, and on the fourth day I’m like, “Oh crap! I almost forgot to write today’s email!”

I’ve never liked batching for this exact reason, but I also don’t like letting inspiration go to waste.

I guess the obvious solution would be to write every day no matter what, and if I happen to write three in one day, send them all out that day, maybe spread out over a few hours.

Not sure what that would do for my unsubscribe numbers, but I like that idea better than scheduling them farther and farther out into the future.

Here’s the thing...

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s prolly this:

Perfect is the enemy.

If you want to start a daily practice - writing or otherwise - know that you ARE going to miss a day.

Don’t sweat it

Just start.

And if/when you miss a day, don’t miss the next one.

Yours,

—J

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