What will you do in 90 days?

How not to get drawn into things that don’t work

Spending 10,000 hrs hours doing something to gain mastery is an idea that requires 9.15 years to complete, with 3 hours of daily practice. But you can achieve a fair grip over the subject or the topic of your choice by putting in 100 hrs of deliberate work. 1 hr daily and you can complete 100 hrs in about 3 months.

For the last couple of years, I have used this to create my very own 90-in-90 content framework to build myself up and try out something new for at least 90 days before giving up or going all in.

• Want to get better at UI design? Try creating 90 UI designs from scratch.
• Want to get see if you can improve your writing skills? Try writing 90 blog posts.
• Want to get better at facilitation skills? Try facilitating 90 discussions with people from your company and you’ll improve on setting up meetings, taking notes, directing people, and collaborating.
• Want to learn & improve your swimming? Aim at swimming 2000 meters for 90 days and you’ll see an improvement in your movement pattern.

Although 100 looks to be a better number, the 90 in 90 framework works for multiple reasons and is slightly less tiring as compared to doing it 100 times. Here are a few reasons why —

The 21/90 rule. It takes 21 days to build a habit. It takes 90 days to start a lifestyle.

• A hundred as a number is perceived by our brain as rather large, something that is not easily available. On the other hand, 90 is a trick number and it makes us feel like reaching it is slightly more achievable as compared to 100.
• To do something 90 times, you will spend more than 100 hrs getting better at it. Hence, it helps you to achieve a level of mastery that is greater than that of 100 hrs but less than 10,000 hrs.
• The 21/90 rule. It takes 21 days to build a habit. It takes 90 days to start a lifestyle.
• You get enough data in 90 days to analyze and plan your next steps forward. You get to know what you don’t like. What you’d like to change, and most importantly what is worth pursuing and what’s not?

You don’t need perfect

Story time...

Two groups are told to make clay pots. Group A is told they have 2 hours to make one clay pot and to make it as beautifully as they can. Group B is told that the beauty doesn’t matter, just make as many as possible in 2 hours. Which group had the better-looking clay pot at the end of the 2 hours?
The answer is Group B. The one that made more of them had the better-looking pot. Why? Practice.

Anyone trying to create something should keep this story in mind. The perfectionism in us all sometimes prevents us from making beautiful things.

• At first, you will do everything wrong. And that’s okay. It is expected. The most important thing was that you are there and doing it.
• Second, your results don’t need you to be perfect either. In the beginning, it just requires you to show up and put in the work. You can optimize later.
• Take it easy on yourself. Let go of your need for things to be perfect.
• Get started. Show up. Do the work.

Making the process simpler

I understand that we all lead a relatively busy life and going for a 90-day hackathon doing something new isn’t always the best and most practical idea. Hence to make it simpler and easier on ourselves, we can do the following:

No Deadline

Don’t set a deadline for achieving your 90 in 90 goals. While a deadline and following through with it is great, it’s not always ideal when you end up abandoning your goals just because you missed a day or two in between. Taking breaks, not making progress, and just procrastinating are all parts of the goal-achieving cycle. Take as much time as you need to achieve your goal. The easiest way to achieve your goal is to give it 2 years and only make progress on the weekends. 52 weekends = 52 Hits. I borrowed part of these learnings from

and

.

30–30–30 Rule

Pivot or change direction every time you make 33.33% progress. Once you do something 30 times, you can take a seat back and crunch some data and decide on your next steps based on the data from the last 30 attempts. This way you are making intentional and informed progress for all your 90 attempts.

Disclaimer: I usually keep going until I hit my 90 mark and then analyze the data for my next 90 attempts. This approach has some pros and cons. It gives me more room for error, but as a con, I might be making the same mistakes without stopping and looking to correct them for a while.

My Notion Log & Progress

To keep a strict check on my goals and where I am on my journey, I keep an active Notion log with all my attempts listed down.

My simple Notion log

In the past I have —

• Tried to create a Substack Newsletter with all my detailed design case studies — ⛔️ Failed
• Tried to contribute to the Figma Community — 🚴‍♀️ In Progress
• Recently started to fill my profile with digital items on Gumroad — 🚴‍♀️ In Progress
• Tried improving my UI design by shooting on Dribbble — ✅ Completed 90x
• Tried writing blog posts on Medium — ✅ Completed 90x

Learnings

Dribbble shots where I replicated the Apple AirPods Splash Page Design

So far from all these, I found Dribbble to be the most boring of them all. It was hard for me to design an endless stream of UI shots without a proper brief or even a problem statement to chase after. Given my learnings, I don’t plan to return to Dribbble for a long time.

On the other hand, I found writing on Medium to be my most electrifying activity and I am now on Series #2 where I am planning to write my next 90 blog posts and see how they are received by the audience.

My 5-year progress writing on Medium

What you see above is my 5-year progress writing on Medium. I started writing just for fun in 2018 and continued in an ad-hoc manner in the year 2019. In 2020 I finally felt energized to approach it as a part-time activity that I would want to do after work.

To reach my 90 blog post target, I followed

’s approach of writing every weekend and hitting publish no matter how terrible my end output would be. Hitting PUBLISH gets the blog post out of the door and into the world. It also allows me to continue on my next post and not think about the one that I just published. Undoubtedly, this approach worked for me very well.

Here is my data analysis statement after writing on Medium 90 times in the last five years.

5 years in the making. 137.5% growth in 2021. Topics — Design Systems, Leadership, & Branding had the highest impact.

Pro Tip: When setting up 90 in 90 goals, try NOT to define goals that are out of your control. Always follow the idea that you can control your intensity and output, but cannot control the final result. For example, even though you might upload 90 videos on YouTube in 90 days, there is no guarantee that your subscriber count will increase or all your video will have a high views count.

🙌 That’s all folks!

Thanks for making it to the end. I hope you gained something from it. I will write a more detailed analysis of my writing experience and data on Medium in the coming days and I hope to continue writing in 2022 and the next year 🤞.