What makes writing enjoyable for me

Until recently, I didn't fully appreciate how much having a setup that made writing enjoyable contributed to my motivation to write. I've always had observations or reflections that I've wanted to write down, but I'd need to forcibly remind myself to journal it in my Obsidian vault. It wasn't a very exciting process because all of these notes were scattered throughout my vault with no real organization, and I couldn't point to something immediately after writing it.

Now I have a simple system: I write markdown files in a folder with Obsidian, and they get rendered on my site. I can't fully distill what's so different about this, but somehow seeing my writing be put out on the web is gratifying and holds me to be more accountable¹. It really gives me instant gratification. Where previously I would wait years before I look back on something I wrote earlier and appreciate that I wrote it, now I can immediately point to something I wrote and say, look, that's on my website!

This can probably be generalized to the concept discussed in Atomic Habits of using systems that enforce habits over bursts of motivation. But this is a cool example that I'm observing in real time.

Of course, it's still early to claim that this is a sustainable system. Earlier I maintained blog.param.me, but I always kept that behind a login for some reason². Looking back, it was the worst of both worlds: the complexity of online blogging with its higher activation energy, all without the accountability of writing in public. I hope this can be the opposite of that, where I can write notes like I would for myself, but others can view them too.

The next system I would like to work on is a system of reading. Maybe that will be in the form of a public book review page. I do really like Matthew Yang's bookshelf section :)

Footnotes

1. On the other hand, this also incentivizes me to be more "complete" with my writing -- which I'm not sure is a good thing. I feel less comfortable putting out the less polished thoughts that I would've been okay writing in my personal notes. Maybe this is something that I can overcome over time, or perhaps I can maintain a separate set of unlisted notes to allow myself the freedom to be incomplete or even incorrect. ↩

2. I have now made some of these posts public (everything before 2026 on this site is from there). I'm not sure why I didn't make these public earlier -- maybe it was the fear of judgement. It's easier now because they are dated and I can share them alongside my own judgement, almost as if they are not written by the current version of myself :) ↩