The reason you can keep producing articles or creative work for a long time isn't just "it might pay off someday."
There's a reward while you're still making it:
- You figure out a question
- You finish one piece
- You get faster than before
- The things you researched stay with you
- You build more templates you can reuse
- You open up more options for later
Amabile and Kramer report that the small sense of "I'm moving forward" in meaningful work has a strong effect on people's daily mood and motivation. [3]
Writing articles makes these small wins easy to see.
0 pieces yesterday, 1 today.
0 templates, 1 today.
A check that took 30 minutes yesterday takes 15 today.
It's like a game where your XP bar creeps up a tiny bit each time, and you end up wanting just one more round.
But if you only watch the count, it gets risky.
"I made 100 pieces!" Except 97 of them are basically the same.
That's not inventory. That's a warehouse disaster.
Besides the count, you also need to check for duplicates, sources, updates, translation errors, and whether the piece is actually useful to readers.
