At the beginning of last month I challenged myself to write 1000 words each and every week day. In total that would mean about 23,000 words, which definitely sounds like a massive achievement. So, how did I do? And was it worth it?
What I Achieved
So, first things first, did I succeed with my goal? Well, yes and no. I missed some days, and then some days did double to make up for it. But during the middle of the month I got a cold and just felt really fuzzy-headed. I could barely concentrate on writing, so I let myself off those days and didn’t make them up.
So technically I failed, but I still feel like I achieved so much. I missed about 4 days in total and that means I still have almost 20,000 words written. I used most of those on drafts of blog posts for this blog. I tended to write posts of about 1,000 words or longer as I found it a lot easier staying with one piece of content than splitting the words up between multiple posts.
In total I wrote about 13 new blog post drafts (some posts were extra-long so counted for more than one day). I also wrote a few autoresponder emails that I counted in my daily limit.
How I Fit My Writing Into My Daily Routine
Before I started the challenge I spent a good amount of time brainstorming blog post ideas (about 50 of them). This meant that when it was time to write, it was easy to just sit down and pick a topic without hesitation, based on what I “felt like” in that moment. I think the process would’ve taken a lot longer if I hadn’t already put in that effort to brainstorm.
As the challenge went on, I made sure to keep note of any fresh ideas in my phone notes. Sometimes a title would come to me, and sometimes I’d have a full outline. I’d quickly jot it down and forget about it until it came time to write.
As I said in my first post about setting myself this challenge, I was only writing first drafts of everything. I didn’t generally go back and edit anything I’d done, and it’s surprising how quickly the words flowed out of me. Sometimes I’d be done with my challenge in about 15 minutes, if I was writing on something that I had lots of ideas about without researching.
I was hoping that I’d also get better about making writing a part of my daily routine, but the truth is that I did it at all different times of day depending on whether I felt like it. And sometimes I left it until the end of the day and just squeezed it in so I could check the task off the list for the day!
What I’ll Learn From This Going Forward
I think this challenge is a great exercise for a few reasons. Personally I go through phases when I feel “blocked” for no reason. And the one real antidote to that is simply to write, even when you don’t feel like it. This challenge helped massively with that. It gets me back into the habit, and it shows me that I actually have a lot more to say than I sometimes think!
It also showed me the power of batching. To have 13 long and very detailed blog posts drafted is a great achievement, and will help me schedule things in advance. I quite like the idea of having periods in my business when I write blog posts in bulk, and then periods when I create the graphics and schedule them to my blog in bulk. It helps me get in the zone and I feel I’m more productive when focusing on similar tasks rather than lots of different ones throughout the days.
So the challenge is over, for now, but I will definitely be doing this again sometime in the future!
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