Midway Progress Update: 30 days / 30 articles challenge
Eight out of thirty articles written
Two weeks ago I set out on a writing challenge: I would write thirty articles within the thirty days in June—a "30 days, 30 articles" writing challenge. I am now half way through my self-inflicted challenge. How am I doing? In this article I'll evaluate my progress and share some observations thus far.
I had a few reasons why I wanted to do this challenge. I wanted:
to decrease my perfectionism. By being somewhat forced to write an article each day, I have to lower my standards and not fret over little imperfections. To meet my goal, I have to write, do a quick edit, publish, and move on.
to improve my writing. More specifically I wanted to better develop my skill at organizing and distilling the thoughts in my head into words—ideally concise and easy to understand.
to get faster at writing. I feel that I'm really slow. I think it relates to the skill of being able to get your thoughts organized, and on being able to keep focused on writing.
I've been successful at reducing my perfectionism (case in point: this crappy article...). In order to meet my schedule of thirty articles, I'm forced to try and finish at least one article each day. As a result, I've spent far less time ruminating on what I've written. That's been a great relief!
However, I'm not sure I'm much quicker at distilling my ideas and writing them yet. Including this one, I've written and published eight articles so far. That's seven behind. I have a couple of drafts in progress, but so far it's been rather difficult to catch up. Writing articles on the weekend hasn't happened, which means after each weekend I'm two more articles behind. Unless I can catch up, I'll end the challenge eight articles behind from the weekends alone, finishing 22 out of 30. Since I want to reach thirty, I'm going to need to figure out a strategy to write 1.5 articles per day to catch up in the next two weeks. 😰 We'll see..
At the start of this challenge, I expected that having ideas would be the most difficult part. I went into the challenge having prepared some article ideas, and since starting, generating more ideas hasn't been too difficult. At least not when compared to writing them. At the moment I still have more article ideas to write than I've written.
The real difficulty has been actually consistently writing the articles each day. D'uh? I'm sloooow. I find that I am rarely able to get full into Flow while writing. I'm easily distracted. As a result, it easily takes me 3-5 hours to write an article. That's a bit too long and I hope I improve as I write the next 15+.
The tech articles are the most enjoyable ones to write. They're also the most rewarding in terms of readership here on Medium. I've written two so far, and each one was published in the Geek Culture publication, and has been curated by Medium staff for further distribution. But, the tech articles are time consuming. It takes a lot of time to write a good tech article—most of which is spent in preparation of the code (and simplifying it) and not the actual writing.
Where to from here? Well, 15 more days to go and 23 articles to complete. If I can sort out my focus and concentration, I might yet still be able to pull off a successful "30 days, 30 articles" challenge result. See you in another two weeks where we'll see how I did!
Here are all the articles I've completed so far:
June 1, 2021 - 30 Articles in 30 Days Self-inflicted Challenge
June 3, 2021 - Starting: How I Stop Myself From Procrastinating
June 4, 2021 - A Neat Airplane Museum just outside Zürich
June 7, 2021 - How To Set Your REST API's Default Rate & Burst Throttling Limits
June 9, 2021 - 3 Engaging Non-Fiction Books for your Summer 2021 Reading List
June 10, 2021 - How To Animate a Winners' Podium
June 11, 2021 - 3 Curious Short Non-Fiction Books for the Weekend
June 15, 2021 - Midway Progress Update: 30 days / 30 articles challenge (this article)
This article is part of my 30 days / 30 articles challenge where I've attempted to write thirty articles within thirty days.