I’ve been fairly successful with this month’s challenge, to post a new blog post every day. I could not guarantee content, time posted, or comprehensibility of the words, but it happened.
Today is the last day of the challenge. Thank goodness.
I wrote about travel, I wrote about work, I wrote lists and fitness workouts, itineraries and pondered pressing questions. While it was all good and fine, it’s not a habit i’ll be continuing.
While the reasons are many, here are 3 that come to mind:
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I was so committed to completing the challenge, that I could not commit to other activities.
I usually ended up completing and uploading my blog post in the evening, after work. While in some cases the topic would suss itself out throughout the day, it was never finished/posted until that deadline of the next day rolled around.
This made it difficult to do much, since my day was focused on completing this single task. I would wake up and pick a topic. I would walk to work brainstorming the basic structure. Between cues at work I’d either type up initial drafts, or organize ideas. Once I got back to the apartment in the evening, I’d sit down to work and complete the post.
There was little time to, ‘grab a drink at the pub,’ or ‘get breakfast somewhere in the morning.’ These activities did happen, but not every invitation could be accepted, and spare time was dedicated to this monthly challenge.
So if you value free time, or an abundant social life, don’t post a blog a day.
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The posts were often not the quality I wanted them to be.
Call me a perfectionist, maybe. I like to live life not with specific goals and milestones, but with overarching themes like excellence, curiosity, and balance.
The problem with writing a blog post every day, is that you have to accept imperfections. There’s only so much topic research and analyzation you can do while working a full time job and (trying to) get enough sleep.
Sentences could’ve been written with better structure. Ideas could have been examined more thoroughly and explained with better clarity.
Some blog topics sucked. These were the days, after a long, hot, grueling two shows, where I sat down at my laptop and stared at a blank document. I wasn’t able to write a single word or pick a single subject throughout the entire day, and tomorrow was soon approaching. But I refused to fail, and those were the blog posts you got.
I didn’t even consider asking myself, “is this work you’ve done excellent?” because I already knew the answer. Perhaps this was a challenge in overcoming perfectionism as well.
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Unreliable internet connection will find you if you’re doing something important
The internet poops out every time I try to do something actually important. Stream stupid Netflix episodes at any time of the day and it plays without having to buffer a single time. But try to send a dire email? Forget about it. Try to call a bank to discuss something paramount about your account? Nope.
Freeloading off somebody else’s wifi will get you nowhere but frustrated, as I’ve discovered countless times (and yet I still don’t have my own hotspot). It’s something you have to deal with when you travel. You’ll go to airports that don’t offer free wifi. Hotel wifi sucks. Coffee shop wifi is inconsistent, and don’t even get me started on changing countries. (Still trying to figure out that VPN).
When the midnight deadline came creeping up, the internet would cut out and I’d fly into a panicked frenzy trying to upload the blog. It all works out in the end, but still, the struggle is real.
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It wasn’t all bad. I learned a lot from the challenge too.
I became a quicker writer. I became efficient at sourcing stock photos, creating blog heroes (the cover photo for the post) and picking supplemental images. I learned sprinkles from a variety of different topics. I even got linked to by some fitness dude’s email campaign, sending my visitor count soaring for one day. (Strongly skewing my analytics graph with a tall, mocking point making every other data point sad and minuscule in comparison.)
Seriously, look at this:
I also like the process of writing every day. It’s calming to put thoughts on paper, to have a finished product every evening. But this is not a challenge i’ll continue.
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31/31 #YearOfChallenge