My learnings from one year of writing

It was hard to hit the publish button of my first LinkedIn post last January. I'm an extremely private person. You won't find my personal life on any socials. So putting my thoughts out on an very public forum, with my real name, was terrifying.

I kept thinking: What will my coworkers think? What will my boss think? What will my friends think?

But nothing bad happened.

In fact, a few good things happened last year as a direct result of my writing:

• I got invited to an exclusive design creators group.
• I went on Jeremy Miller’s Beyond UX podcast.
• I got invited to speak on a design leadership panel.
• I connected with design leaders and people who embody design craft.
• I reconnected with former coworkers and friends.
• I designed campaign materials for my friend’s election run for city council after a lead from my “How to maximize your luck” post.
• I got promoted.

I didn’t start writing for these wins, though I hoped serendipity would work in my favor. Still, I can’t depend on serendipity alone — I measure my writing to see what works.

I built a notion database where I capture initial ideas, write my drafts, and track metrics. I normalized each post’s performance by dividing a post’s total impressions by 90 days since its publish date. I need to figure out a good pairing metric, but this still gave me decent insights:

• Personal stories about my design career and my thoughts on design performed best.
• Only two of my top 10 posts had media. This surprised me, because I read that posts with media performed better.
• Hooks matter: titles that made a bold claim performed better.
• Money transparency featured in three of my top 10 posts.
• Vulnerability connects: my highest performing post was about my biggest failure: bankrupting my escape room business.

The most important thing I aimed for last year was posting consistently. The quality, content or format didn’t matter as much as just getting something out there every week. I fell off my other habits: working out, eating better etc. But I didn’t give up on writing. I even wrote on the plane on my way to a vacation.

I plan to write even more this year. But I want to spend way less time writing. Each of my previous posts took about 2 hours to write. That’s not sustainable. So I added a “production time” metric in my database to stop overthinking.

I started writing here to think better. Because writing prevents sloppy thinking. And if I get called out on my thinking, I learn something new. Win win.

Thank you for reading.

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P.S. I want to avoid creating cringy LinkedIn content: bland takes, buzzwords, or humblebragging. Basically anything that could be a candidate for r/linkedinlunatics. So this year I’m going to talk more about design craft.

P.P.S. I still feel slightly embarrassed when people mention my writing IRL.