I Failed My 30 Days 30 Articles Challenge
Why I failed and what I'd do differently next time
At the start of this month (June 2021) I set out on a challenge: to publish thirty articles in thirty days. Now, at the end of the month, how did I do? Well... I failed. I only managed to write & publish about one article every other day. Including this one, I wrote thirteen articles. Just under half of my goal of thirty. Not great. In this article I'll look at what went wrong, share some of the results I did achieve, and explore what I'd do differently next time.
What went wrong? The underlying difficulty I had was getting words written. I had plenty of article topics, but I found it a real challenge to sit down and focus on writing the words. Writing was slow, unfocused, and often came in short bursts separated by long stretches of dilly dallying. This is something I need to improve on drastically as a writer. Many of the articles I wrote I feel I should have been able to write in an hour rather than many, many hours.
I wrote three technical articles — these types of articles were time consuming for another reason: technical articles required prepping the associated code and checking that it all worked correctly. However, actually sitting down to write these articles once all the pieces were created usually happened much quicker than the writing of other articles. I suppose this is a hint on how to write other articles quicker: get my ideas organized, perhaps better outlined — and then the words might come quicker.
Other challenges were writing on the weekends: I never managed this — mostly because I was rarely home on the weekends. I tried to compensate for this by planning and trying to double-up and writing two articles in a single day twice a week, but this clearly didn't work out. Of course, motivation, or rather... procrastination... was also an issue — as usual.
In the image above, is a summary of my articles' performance. I took a measurement of the views, reads, and likes/fans of each article after 1 hour, 24, 48, and after a week. I'm not sure I see any clear patterns. I got each of my three tech articles published in the Geek Culture Medium publication, which of course corresponds to more views/reads — the tech articles were generally the best performing ones I published.
Each time I published an article, I shared it on LinkedIn where I have about 1,300 connections spread across mostly Japan, Europe, and the US West coast. This distribution of people across the globe may help explain why it didn't really seem to make much of a difference exactly what time I shared an article, though the sample (13 shared articles) is too small to really say much of anything conclusively.
As part of the challenge, I also wanted to see how much I could earn from the Medium Partner Program, so each of the articles I wrote were monetized. My earnings? I earned a total of USD $4.30 across all thirteen articles. I guess I should stick with my software engineering career. It will be interesting to see how these articles continue to perform over the coming months, e.g. in the "long tail" of viewers. For example, if over the coming months I earn an average of $0.10 per article each month, then I only need to write 10,000 articles if I want to earn $1,000 / month. Hah. 10,000 articles in 365 days challenge, anyone?
It's been a good experience, but I'm glad it's over. While I didn't reach my lofty goal of thirty articles, I still wrote thirteen articles more than I wrote last year. And, I got to practice my writing skills a bit, publishing some article ideas that I've had floating around in my head for a while. I see some of these articles as "published drafts" which I might revisit, expand on, and improve. That's great!
However, I'm not sure I'd do it again. I've learnt that I have a preference for writing longer length articles which this challenge did not encourage. I think my writing also benefits from some rumination, or some time to simmer before I come back to it and wrap it up. Maybe that's just my perfectionism speaking. Nevertheless, I feel that some of the articles I published weren't that great, and I'd prefer to focus a bit more on quality rather than on quantity.
If I were to do a thirty day challenge again, I would make the target lower: twenty articles, say. I find it unlikely that I'll ever manage to write over every weekend in any given month—and as soon as I fell behind, I kept falling behind further and further. Better to set it up so that I cannot fall behind in the first place. I would also pick a different month. Turns out, June isn't a good month for this kind of challenge—it's been hot and I've been doing a lot of hiking on the weekends. Not conducive to focusing on writing. One of the boring uneventful months may have been a better choice. For example: April or November.
Going forward from here, I may mini-challenge myself to write one article every week. Or, perhaps one to two per month. I'd also like for these articles to be better researched and to include more input or insights from other professionals relevant to the article topic.
This article is part of my 30 days / 30 articles challenge where I've attempted to write thirty articles within thirty days.