The order runs from lowest friction to highest: looking, then drawing, then writing, then sounding, then showing. Each daily habit supplies the next one's raw material, so nothing ever starts from a blank page. The exhibition date gets set on day one, because a fixed deadline is what carries a streak past the days you don't feel like it.
Step 1: Start with the smallest creative act
Photography goes first because it costs the least — no materials, no skill floor, no cleanup. Commit to one frame per day, shot in under sixty seconds, and don't edit or re-shoot it. A workable anchor: shoot the same subject every morning for a week (your kitchen window, the walk to the bus) so you notice change instead of chasing novelty. The reframe that matters here: the version of this habit you can do on your worst day is the only version that reaches day 100. A rushed, slightly blurry photo on day 63 protects the streak; a three-hour photo project that exhausts you on day 12 ends it. By step 2 you'll need raw material, and these frames become it. Skip the perfectionism and you end up with 100 pieces of proof you kept looking.
Step 2: Draw from yesterday's photo
Having already banked a week of photographs, you stop hunting for subject matter and start translating it. Take one image from step 1 — ideally yesterday's, so the connection stays tight — and spend five minutes drawing it with a pen. Pen, not pencil, because erasing is where five minutes turns into forty. Keep a single sheet ruled into 100 squares and date each one; the grid does the counting so you don't have to. One approach worth trying: sketch only the dark shapes in the photo and ignore outlines, which trains you to see mass rather than symbols. What derails this step is treating the sketchbook as a portfolio. The day the drawings are supposed to be good is the day a bad one feels like failure and you quit. A sketch is a record of looking, not an artifact.
Step 3: Turn the sketch into words
Writing arrives third because you finally have something specific to describe — a photo you took, a drawing you made — rather than a blank prompt. Write three to five sentences about one detail from yesterday's sketch: what you got wrong, what the light did, why you chose that angle. No topic sentences, no editing, no rereading until day 100. Because a paragraph is short enough to finish while the kettle boils, it survives the days when the sketch didn't happen. A concrete example: describe only the sound or texture you remember from the scene, since the visual is already recorded in steps 1 and 2. The familiar stall is waiting for an idea worth writing down. A paragraph is not an essay; it needs a subject, not an argument. Keep them all in one dated document.
Step 4: Hum twenty seconds, no production
Song comes last among the dailies because it carries the highest perceived barrier, and by now you've spent sixty-odd days proving that low friction beats impressive. Twenty seconds counts. Hum a melody into your phone, sing one line over a loop, tap a rhythm on a table and record it. Lyrics can come straight out of step 3 — read a paragraph aloud and let its rhythm suggest the melody, which is exactly why the writing habit sits directly before this one. Label every file with the date and stop there. Where this collapses is the belief that a song requires a DAW, mixing, and a finished structure. That belief turns a twenty-second voice memo into a project, and it stalls people around day 70, close enough to the end that quitting feels like a waste.
Step 5: Book the exhibit before day one
The exhibit isn't a reward for finishing; it's the mechanism that makes finishing happen, which is why the date belongs on the calendar before the first photo. Pick a real evening and a real room — your living room, a friend's kitchen, a group chat if everyone is remote — and invite five people. Show everything in date order, unedited: 100 photos taped to the wall in a grid, the sketch sheet, printed paragraphs, the audio files queued up. Nobody needs a gallery. The point is that the work gets seen in its raw, uneven state, and the twelve weak entries stay in. Postponing the show until the output improves is the standard way this ends — the streak hits day 100, nothing is scheduled, and the whole thing quietly becomes a folder nobody opens.
A phone reminder vanishes the second you dismiss it and leaves no trace of what you already did. A paper strip taped to a cabinet stays visible until the last line is cut, and it physically gets shorter every day you finish. Put it somewhere you'll see it before you've decided anything.