No Resolutions: Why you should do a 30 Day Challenge Instead
By: Caitlin Burt
Tags: Habit Building, Resolutions, Personal Development, Challenge, Self Improvement

Most progress is noticed through measurement, and unless you are experienced dedicated and systematic about measuring, it’ll be hard to chart improvement over the course of a year. Once you get over how gimmicky 30 day challenges sound, they’re a super useful way to make fast progress. Here are 8 reasons to take on the thinking of a month-at-a-time challenge.

Almost no planning required

To get started you need an accomplishable goal: to become better at a skill, make progress on a project or explore an activity. Once you have a concept and an idea of how you’ll iterate for a week or two, you’re ready to go. We are learning the fun of risk. There aren’t actually stakes here. I know you promised your social followers you’d create 30 different llama logo designs in 30 days, but if you fail I think they’ll forgive you. As an extra sneaky mental trick, plan just enough to get you started and have some cocky swagger that you’ll figure the rest out. Planning halfway will keep you on the edge which will keep you in the creative zone of the unknown.

2. Let creativity swoop in and save you

If gaining ground on a skill in one month doesn’t sound fun enough, theme the weeks of your challenge to ease the ideation phase. Rather than plan 30 workouts, hope to learn 30 recipes or write 30 articles, make mini challenges: a group of workouts you can do completely from the ground, or 7 spicy recipes. I’ve only planned the first two weeks of my challenge because I know I’ll get better ideas partway through and want to scrap whatever I had come up with.

3. Decide where you will post every day

Telling people you plan on doing a 30-day challenge is lame. We’d all much rather hear about the progress. Wherever you announce it, commit to telling people about it at the same place every day. It’ll help you feel more accountable. You might even get great support!

4. You begin to construct your environment to support your endeavor.

The problem with trying to make an instant permanent change is that all the time until now contradicts a habit you haven’t built up yet. If you were keeping score it would probably look like 20 years to 0. Thinking of a month-long habit helps frame it in a way that feels doable. We are used to constant small changes. Our weekends looks different from our weekdays and we don’t lose our shit. If you plan to make a month of something, your brain starts to fill in how it will fit into your schedule, where you will keep what you need, and automatically you start to shift your environment accordingly which is a make-or-break factor of change. If anything, a 30 day challenge is a useful mental trick to making bigger changes down the road.

5. It’s fun because in essence it’s an experiment

It’s easier to get out of your own way when you just decide to start. A resolution is a big promise which puts a lot of pressure on you and you instantly want to avoid the feelings you just came up with. A challenge allows you to toy with an idea and make a smaller commitment, and yet it’s enough time for you to see whether the change you made gave you good feelings or not. The changes you want to make can be self-reinforcing if you can only take the pressure off.

6. Helps keep expectations in check

You aren’t setting out to get ripped in 30 days (I hope), which would lead to some dashed expectations unless you’re nearly there. I know some people are all for dreaming big, but I get really motivated when I see progress that’s within my reach. It helps keep the focus narrow and commitment sustainable. It makes doing the work that much more exciting.

7. Its a great opportunity to learn Time Blocking

Time blocking beats list making any day, according to many articles I’ve read here on Medium. Introducing a new type of task to do every day is a big time suck, so you might want to chunk similar activities so that you can accomplish a lot at once and be able to take the weekends off. You don’t want to burn out on your first challenge. If you were making 30 characters on youtube like me, you would write as many as you can in one sitting, film several in one day, edit a few another day, and then you’re a few days ahead of pace to rest and get more creative energy going. You can still make lists. List what different 30 day challenges you want to do this year.

8. You’ll learn how to track and measure progress

These types of things tend to leave a trail. Whether it’s your social posts, photo progress, or the actual projects completed daily, you’ll be able to look back and see how far you’ve come. As a bonus you could journal the development of the month and further track your inner game. If you do, please include me on the recap or share your lessons-learned at the end. And of course congratulate yourself for finishing, whatever progress you made. I have a feeling success rates with this would be much higher than with resolutions.

Caitlin vlogs and acts. Her self-inflicted challenge is to perform 30 different characters in youtube videos. Many are gender bended https://youtu.be/RbLOH2IbJxc

Good luck on your ventures!