On 100 Days of Making

I am now on day 10 of 100 days of writing, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually explained what this is or why I'm doing it. This is a practice I've done at least once a year since 2022, and has proven itself over and over to be one of the best things I can possibly do for myself, so not writing about it yet seems like a bit of an oversight.

100 Days Of Making is pretty much what it sounds like. You pick a thing (preferably a creative one) and produce a variation on that idea or theme every day for 100 days in a row. I was introduced to this practice at ITP, my grad school, where it's a for-credit course that a lot of students take and tend to wear as a badge of honor. At ITP, the primary requirement is that you document what you make publicly: people tend to either put it on blogs, special Instagram accounts for their projects, or GitHub.

Ironically, I never actually took the class at ITP. But I saw a lot of friends go through it, and was particularly inspired by my friend James Hosken, who started by doing 100 Days of Spaceships in Blender, and has since done the same concept in about a dozen different ways. James' way of doing 100 days has always struck me as the ideal form: he picks a theme and a medium and sticks to it. But everyone goes about it in different ways: folks will just do a theme, or a framework, or a specific practice. The important thing is that you do it every day, and that you produce something new every day.

This probably sounds like an insane idea to a lot of people. Committing to doing anything every day for a hundred days in a row is tough. There will be days when you're tired, or hungover, or you're hit by an act of God. And if you're producing something new every day, chances are you're not going to be able to do any work that requires long-term attention and focus: if you're doing 100 Days of Writing, at least the way I think of it, then you're probably not going to write a novel during it, just (for example) 100 discreet blog posts of middling quality. And, if you do it right, you're going to take the mortifying next step of sharing everything you make publicly, no matter its quality.

The things that make it a weird or bad idea are, to me, the best parts of it. Everyone loves the idea of a daily practice, but daily practices tend to fall apart once you hit a creative blocker: I imagine most creative people, like me, have literal dozens of projects in various stages of completeness that got abandoned because they couldn't get past some specific issue, or they required more time than you had. A well-designed hundred days project forces your hand by not requiring anything more of you than a couple of minutes of your time. And if you stick to the commitment, even if you have a lot of days where you can only spare 10-15 minutes to work on it, you'll end up having a lot of days where you find yourself having worked on something for hours that you meant to dash off quickly. It is the most effective way of sustaining creative practice I've ever found, because it asks nothing more of you than that you do the damn thing every day.

It's also a valuable practice of letting things be "good enough", or of not letting perfect be the enemy of good. If you do this the way (I think) it ought to be done, you share each day's output publicly, no matter how proud of it you are. If you aren't superhuman (or doing a project in something you're already good at, something there's no shame in but I have rarely done) you will pretty quickly find yourself hit a day where you're less than proud of what you did. You still have to share it. Sorry, I don't make the rules. I'm ten days in and there are already things on this blog I would prefer to hide from the world, but they're part of my hundred days project, and they live here now. Sometimes the things you make are just bad, sure. But, like a lot of creative people, I can often be too precious about my projects, refusing to stop fiddling with them until I think they're perfect and dragging my feet on letting the harsh gaze of the outside world perceive them. But, as much as I wish I did this entirely for myself, I make art for other people. At some point it has to be seen. Getting in the habit of sharing things as they're still works in progress, or even if they'll never be done, helps desensitize you to the fear of sharing your imperfect work and imperfect self with the world. And, sometimes, you'll find out that things you have no idea how to feel about are super well received. You should put art out in the world as often as possible, at every degree of doneness, and see what happens. The results will often surprise you.

I've done this about five times now to varying degrees of success, and I can't recommend it enough. That said, I've failed at it before too, so here are a few thoughts on a successful hundred days project learned from both sides of the coin.

How To Succeed At A Hundred Days of Making

• Have a group to be accountable with. Every time I've done this, I've been in a group chat with other friends doing the same thing. You know who you are.
• Pick something you can do in five minutes or less if you have to. You never know what might happen, and if you want to make sure you don't miss a day, you'll have to expect there will be days where you barely have time to spare.
• Pick something specific and actionable: the more vague or far-reaching the goal, the less likely you are to stick to it. "I am going to write a blog post every day" is a lot more specific than "I am going to write a novel". You can get writer's block on a novel: you can write a blog post about literally anything, even the fact that you have writer's block.
• Even better, pick a specific theme or a specific practice: saying I'll do 100 Days of Circles or 100 Days of Drawing is better than 100 days of "metaphysical intra-human exploration". You can come up with a more arty-sounding name if you want, I've done it before, but the core idea should be reducible to something relatively simple. It makes it easier on you to decide what to do if you set the boundaries for yourself ahead of time, and it also helps to be able to explain what you're doing in a few sentences or less. Limitations make you more creative.
• Pick something you want to do: this seems obvious, but I've tried to do 100 days when I wasn't really feeling it, and that's the only time I ended up fully giving up on the project. I think people often try to do projects they think they should do but don't really want to, and end up quitting. A hundred days is more like doing a sketch than painting a mural: it should be, to some degree, a disposable practice, something that doesn't always feel important in the grand scheme of your art practice.
• Do it every day. Obviously this is the name of the game, but it's the most important part! If that act of God really does hit, pick it back up as soon as you can - ideally the next day. The longer you let yourself say you're taking a break, the more likely it is that break becomes permanent. I do struggle with how to feel about missing days: I think you shouldn't beat yourself up, but it also stops really counting as a hundred days if you consistently miss days. So, I dunno, try your best to stick to the spirit of the thing.

I'd argue my most successful hundred days projects so far (both in terms of how I feel about the creative output, and how consistent I was in working on them) have been 100 Days of Loops and 100 Days of Three.js. Neither of these had a thing to do with any bigger projects I was working on, but they were fun, simple, and themes that I could work on for several hours or several minutes depending on the day. I think these are the only two hundred days projects I never missed a day on. Hopefully this writing project joins them.