I’ve had my Freewrite for years. For most of them it sat on a shelf, and I blame Postbox. I’m still angry that they never tracked my streaks correctly.
When I first got the device, I was very motivated to write because of the Postbox platform that gave me an overview of my progress and my streaks. Because who doesn’t love streaks!
One day, I only had time to write at the end of my workday and was sad to see that my streak was now zero. It seems that the streaks are determined by the server’s time zone, and if I don’t write by a specific hour, then I lose that day.
From then on, I tried to write first thing in the morning just to get the streak back, but when we started having to go back to the office, those opportunities became fewer and fewer. So I gave up trying to maintain the streak altogether and just lived with it.
Eventually, I fell out of the habit, and the Freewrite only came out during vacations and time off, or if I happened to be bored and wanted to practice typing.
At the start of the year, with all the AI bonanza, I picked it back up again because it was one way to reflect and write without the distraction of everything else on the computer. No terminal tempting me to fire up Claude with the next app idea that comes to mind.
I still didn’t want my writing to land on Postbox’s servers. So I built a sync program that copies the files from my device onto my PC, and since August, Postbox syncing has been off for good.
I even took it a step further by adding tags like #blogdraft that would trigger another job to put the file in another folder, ready for me to review when I’m at my computer.
It was a great workflow, and after that I even added a yolo tag that would publish directly to my blog via email.
The next evolution was adding an editor to the draft step that would first review for typos and fix them. That was an AI step I inserted after the draft, and the post could still go yolo after it. It has since grown into a text UI app where I can trigger different kinds of editors on the draft: light fixes, moving paragraphs around, or critique mode.
I definitely use it a lot more now. I literally type out all my drafts on the typewriter because I know I have a whole workflow that will help me edit later.
Today I was curious whether I’d been missing out on new firmware and decided to check out their Reddit. Someone was still complaining about miscounted streaks, so I added one more step to my Freewrite sync workflow that generates a page for my writing stats and publishes it to my site on sync. It’s at itsybit.se/streak.
And then the battery died, and the Freewrite decided it was the 10th of October. So even my own streak counter needed fixing. At least this time I could fix it.
This is what I love about having AI help me build things: I get to go full Thanos. Fine, I’ll do it myself.
