30 Day Challenge

Random Observation/Comment #262: Being productive is tremendously rewarding. So rewarding that I’ll assign myself work and do it for free…

executive.

I was inspired by this ted talk about the 30 day challenge and decided to pursue some of these for myself. The main idea is to commit to a goal and plan daily activities to complete the challenge you set for yourself.

As Matt Cutts explains, the reason behind this is so that you can hopefully maintain a good habit if you liked it beyond the 30 days and incorporate it into your life. These challenges will test your personal motivation to complete these tasks and probably give you a wider feeling of accomplishment as the months pass.

Here are some 30 day challenges I’ll try to complete before the end of the year:

  • 30,000 words in 30 days – write 30,000 words for my book
  • 30 days of photos – take a picture every day and describe your mood during the picture
  • 3,000 pushups in 30 days – 100 push-ups per day –> pretty good routine, but I’ve never maintained it for all 30
  • Send a message to a different old friend to reconnect everyday for 30 days – this should be easier with fb, right?
  • blog once a week for 30 days
  • learn 5 new words per day (in any language) for 30 days – this should help with my pursuit of increasing my vocabulary in German and Japanese as well
  • Complete 1 toastmaster speech per month – this is actually quite difficult. Maybe I’ll just talk about this blog post….

Here are some of my completed 30 day challenges:

  • 30 days of foodspotting – actually still doing this after 4 months
  • 30 days of yelping – got into yelp elite because of it. Sweet.
  • 30 days of writing in a diary – I’ve been keeping this up for the past 2 years. I use Google calendars and set alarms for myself.
  • 30 days without scrabble games – My phone was always on wordsmith, words with friends, and wordfeud. It was getting out of hand so I had to get off of it. I play occasionally with 3 good friends. It was really taking up too much time having 5 games open on 3 different apps with random people. Plus, I kept winning.
  • 30 days of blogging consistently – I had done this in Japan for 6 months, when I had no life. It was easy – A foreign country with no internet at night. When I got back, I had to pull this back a bit because I started to have a real life.

I’m going to pace myself, so I’ll start with the workout routine and messaging a different old friend every day. I’ll have one blog per week for the update on these challenges and then one blog per month on a topic I will use for my Toastmasters speeches.

Wish me luck!

~See Lemons Challenged