4 Tips to Help You Keep Your Focus On What Matters…The Work

It will encourage you, it will discourage you, leave you inspired, leave you uninspired, push your forward, set you back.

This is the brutal truth about looking at your writing stats: views, likes, engagement. These aren’t irrelevant, not if you want to play the game.

But underneath their seduction lies a slippery slope that any young writer must manage with focus.

1. Prioritize the process over everything. Your work starts with, well, the work. Don’t forget that, don’t skip it, and don’t put it on the back burner.
2. Schedule your bad habit. It’s tempting, perhaps too tempting. Therefore you probably can’t hold off not looking at your stats. It’s ok, just schedule this little craving.
3. Let it instruct, if it must. You can use your stats to improve your writing, discover what works, and lead you to where you need to write. Take out the dopamine hit and let your stats coach your writing.
4. Persist through it all. When we don’t see the stats we desire, it’s hard to swallow. Push through it. Results take time, and your stats are rarely a direct reflection of your work — either way.