30 day challenges
I love reading stuff written by Matt Cutts, the head of the webspam team at Google. In addition to the obvious stuff that is relevant to my web business, he is also a normal guy that posts to a somewhat personal blog. My favorite posts are his 30 day challenges. For some reason they always make me want to get my act together and get stuff done. So my wife and I decided (or rather, I agreed to do something she wanted to try in exchange for trying 30 day challenges) that we are going to do some 30 day challenges of our own.
First, we are going to do a monthly family challenge. We have a list of ideas, such as having friends over more often, writing a novel together, only eating foods produced locally, or getting out of the house every day (shopping doesn’t count!), and are going to take turns picking which we are going to do. Some challenges will require daily effort, some won’t, but all of them will make us stretch out of our comfort zones or learn new things.
Second, we are going to do individual challenges. We are thinking of coming up with challenges that we can devote at least 30 minutes a day to, at least 5 days a week. For example, I might pick a website that I want to work on and commit to doing 30 minutes a day/5 days week so I can actually get it done. Or I might pick a woodworking project, or maybe I’ll put more time into cooking. Becca might devote the time to studying design, illustrating/writing blog posts, or sewing projects. The idea is to bring some structure into our lives while giving us the opportunity to develop skills in different areas.
This is going to be our first month doing this so we’ll see how it goes. I plan on posting a follow-up post every month to report how well we did on our challenges.