These were all the superstars of the mobile design community, people whom I look up to and read all their work. Then he told me who else was a part of the project. Turns out he had come across some of my recent blog posts on designing for iOS and was looking for an author to write the iOS chapter for their mobile book. Huh? He runs this massive site and was planning on emailing me? I wasn’t sure he would even remember who I was. I was very surprised when he responded right away saying that he was thrilled I emailed, because he’d been meaning to email me. When planning The App Design Handbook launch I wrote to Vitaly, the editor-in-chief, about writing guest posts on the site. Smashing Magazine is a massive design blog (nearing 1 million readers) that has some fantastic articles. I was asked to write a chapter for Smashing Magazine’s new book on mobile. 10,000 words for my chapter in The Smashing Mobile Book.25,000 words for the new project (see below).30,000 words for The App Design Handbook.Here’s a rough breakdown of what I wrote: Not just for the product itself (in my case a book), but also promotion posts, guest posts, tutorials, help documentation, and all kinds of other content. I guess I’ve come a long way from the days I struggled to write enough each week for a single blog post.Ī successful project needs a huge amount of content. Now I am thrilled to say that I have written 1,000 words a day for 100 days in a row, for a total output of approximately 100,000 words of content. I never managed to write more than 5,000 words for a single project. Every previous time I had tried to write a book (yes, there were several previous attempts) I worked on it when I felt inspired. The commitment is what made the difference. So if I started writing a book in 2009, why did I not publish one until 2012? On November 7th, 2009, I created a text document called “Outline.” As the title suggests, it was an outline for the book I was going to write about designing web software. Well, I had that commitment, so without skipping a day, I kept writing. I didn’t have the next project planned, having put everything into the book and launch. This allowed me to make rapid progress on my book, The App Design Handbook, write dozens of guest posts for other blogs, and continue to write each week for my own site. After the insanely successful book launch I wasn’t sure what to do next. Soon it was so long that I was going to write 1,000 words every day no matter what happened. But then starting in July I kept the streak going. I would build up a chain of 5-10 days in a row, but then something would happen to break the chain (usually travel). I tracked my progress in Commit, an iPhone app I designed for tracking habits. Here is the exact commitment I made: “I will write 1,000 words every day.” In May 2012 I made a commitment that changed my career: A simple task, completed every day, that skyrocketed my blog and allowed me to make over $30,000 in 6 weeks.

Writing challenge 1000 words a day