What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?
I have broken almost every promise I ever made to myself. One survived. It is the shortest and worst drafted of all of them, and I have finally worked out why.
The Only Instrument I Ever Drafted That Worked
Being the text of a private undertaking, with notes on its clauses
I have spent a working life on legislative drafting and on providing legal opinion to the government on matters of importance. It took me a long time to realise that the promises I made to myself were instruments too—and that, like any instrument, they could fail for the most ordinary reason: bad drafting.
Here is the only one that held. I set it out in the form it should always have been given.
PART I — THE INSTRUMENT
THE DAILY WRITING UNDERTAKING, 2023
WHEREAS the undersigned has for some years intended to write, and has written only when the conditions were favourable;
AND WHEREAS the conditions have rarely been favourable;
BE IT ENACTED by the undersigned in his own jurisdiction, there being no other authority competent to legislate in the matter:
1. Short title and commencement.
This undertaking may be called the Daily Writing Undertaking, 2023. It shall come into force at once.
2. The obligation.
Something shall be written and published every day.
3. Exceptions.
There are none.
4. Repeal.
All previous undertakings of the undersigned on the subject of writing, whether express or implied, whether recorded or merely intended, are hereby repealed.
5. Savings.
Nothing in the repeal shall be construed as excusing the years already lost.
6. Duration.
This undertaking shall remain in force until the undersigned is no longer able to give effect to it, and shall not be capable of suspension in the meantime on any ground, including the grounds hitherto found persuasive.
7. Enforcement.
There is no enforcement mechanism.
PART II — NOTES ON CLAUSES
Clause 1. Commencement.
Every failed promise I ever made to myself commenced on a Monday, or on the first of a month, or in January. The delay was always presented as preparation. It was not preparation; it was the last opportunity to reconsider, and I took it every time. An instrument that comes into force at once cannot be reconsidered, because by the time you think to reconsider it you are already in breach.
Clause 2. The obligation.
Eleven words. I want to draw attention to their poverty, because it is the whole of the matter.
My earlier undertakings on this subject were far better documents. They specified a word count. They distinguished between drafting days and revision days. They contained a schedule of the subjects to be treated and a proviso permitting deferment where professional commitments so required. They were, in short, exactly what a well-drafted instrument is supposed to be: precise, comprehensive, anticipating every contingency.
Every one of them failed within the month. This one, which anticipates nothing and permits nothing, has held for more than a thousand days.
I no longer believe this is a coincidence. Complexity in an instrument is not thoroughness. It is very often doubt, written down. Each proviso I inserted was a door I was leaving open because I did not truly intend to be bound, and a man who leaves eleven doors open will find one of them within the fortnight.
Clause 3. Exceptions.
The shortest clause and the load-bearing one.
The difficulty with a reasonable exception is that it is reasonable. Illness is a genuine reason. So is bereavement, so is travel, so is a day that ran to fourteen hours. Any adjudicator would allow them. The trouble is that once the instrument contains a category of excusable non-performance, every day thereafter must be assessed against it, and the assessment is conducted by the person seeking the excuse.
Remove the category and the daily question disappears. There is nothing to weigh. This is not severity, whatever it looks like from outside. It is the removal of a burden — the burden of adjudicating one’s own case every morning for a thousand mornings.
Clause 5. Savings.
I include this clause because the alternative is dishonest.
There is a species of writing about kept promises which implies that the keeping repairs the years before it. It does not. Nothing in this undertaking recovers a single day of the long stretch in which I intended to write and did not. The instrument operates prospectively. Whatever was lost is lost, and I would rather record that plainly than let the count at the top of the page suggest otherwise.
Clause 7. Enforcement.
Here is the defect, and I could not remedy it. A provision with no enforcement mechanism is not a provision; it is a sentiment in the shape of one, and by every principle of my trade this undertaking should have gone the way of the others.
It did not, and the reason took me two years to see. The enforcement was supplied from outside, by people I had not consulted and mostly will never meet. Somebody opens the thing in the morning. That is all. I did not build that mechanism into the instrument and could not have; it attached itself.
Which yields the only finding in this document I would defend in any forum. A promise made to yourself alone is heard by the one person guaranteed to accept every excuse you offer. It is not a weak obligation. It is not an obligation at all. What binds is not the seriousness of the resolution, nor the strength of the character behind it, but the plain fact of somebody waiting.
Extent and application.
This instrument applies to one person and has no force anywhere else. But the drafting principles are general, and I would put them to you in the form of a question rather than an assertion.
The promise you are presently failing to keep — how long is it? How many conditions does it carry? How many circumstances have you provided for in which it need not apply?
And who, apart from you, would notice tomorrow if it were quietly allowed to lapse?
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 25 July 2026
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