Greetings, readers! Don’t forget to sign up for our second master class of the year, Editing and proofreading for into-English translators, taught by Karen Tkaczyk on September 29. This three-hour class always gets rave reviews, and will teach you processes and tools that you can start using right away. Past participants tell us that it has increased the quality of their work, given them more confidence that they’re not submitting translations with typos in them, and allowed them to start offering editing as a standalone service. Registration ($75) includes the recording.
On to this week’s newsletter topic: the value of giving yourself 30-day challenges.
I like 30-day challenges, because I think they help us see that:
-Whatever the challenge is, we can do it
-And/but, we don’t have to do it forever
Every year, I tell my March Marketing Madness challenge participants two things:
- I hope that you see that doing some marketing every work day for a month is doable, and it won’t kill you
- I hope that you form a marketing habit, but you don’t have to market every single day for the rest of your life once the challenge is over
The same is true of any 30-day challenge you might want to embark on: pick something that you want to do more of (or less of; more on that below!), but also tell yourself that this effort doesn’t have to last forever, only for 30 days.
I’ve been thinking about 30-day challenges because I recently needed a new planner. I still use a paper planner–honestly not for technophobic reasons, but because I travel a lot, and I hate the automatic time zone adjustments in Google Calendar. I’m starting to get some things on the calendar for 2024, so I went looking for a new planner, hoping to find something a little jazzier than the plain black one I purchased at Office Depot last year!
I’m honestly not much of an impulse purchaser (of anything), but as if Facebook could read my mind, up popped an ad for the Commit 30 planner (not an affiliate deal), which, who knew, is also a woman-owned small business right in my home state of Colorado. Commit 30 was running a special where you got a free 2023 planner when you bought 2024, so I ordered it up, and I love it. The planner pages are great (week-at-a-glance), there’s lots of room for extra notes (bullet journal pages in the back), it has two page-marking ribbons, one for that month’s 30-day challenge page and one for the current week (it’s the little things; I love this feature!), and it encourages you to give yourself a 30-day challenge every month of the year.
For the rest of 2023, I decided to try two types of 30-day challenges: something I’m going to do every single day of the 30 days, and something that I don’t necessarily do every day, but that I want to do regularly, within that 30-day period. For September, I picked:
- Meditating every day with the Calm app
- Not looking at Facebook or Instagram on weekends
I’m already very happy with both of these: I’ve meditated a lot with the Calm app since December 2020 when I first started using it. Basically around the time that we realized that COVID and the associated restrictions were not going away any time soon. But I’ve only meditated 30 days in a row one time during the almost three years that I’ve used the app, and I wanted to try it again. I feel like the consistency is really beneficial: my mind feels slower (in a good way) and quieter, my blood pressure is consistently really low (114/65 when I went to the doctor the other day!) and I feel more relaxed in general.
The “no social media on weekends” challenge is an example of something I don’t want to give up forever, but the 30-day challenge has been beneficial. My husband and I usually go for a long mountain bike ride or hike on the weekends, and when I get home, I often spend too much time on my phone in the name of recovery. This past weekend, I was able to knock off a couple of projects around the house that had been hanging over my head, which felt good. I can see myself using this technique to cut back on things I don’t want to completely give up but that I have a tendency to overdo (coffee) to see what happens.
I like the 30-day challenge because it gives you a taste of what consistency in certain areas can do for you. I’m thinking that next month I’ll try practicing music every day that I’m home, and I’d also like to try going to bed at 10 PM for a month and see what benefits I get from that. I think that trying something new for a month can help you determine:
- How onerous it is to do the thing; in the case of meditation, the answer is “not at all.” I’ve listened to the Calm app in all kinds of places: on the bus, while waiting for a Zoom call to start, while waiting for the oven to preheat, while waiting for my sandwich in a restaurant. I can definitely see myself continuing this habit.
- How much benefit you get from the thing: is the effort worth continuing?
- What the pleasure/pain tradeoff is. For example I wonder if I would actually have more energy if I consumed less caffeine, but I honestly don’t know because I rarely go even one day without it.
I’m a rule-follower, so I really like the Commit 30 planner’s little date bubbles that you get to cross off when you do your challenge for that day, but you could also use any sort of carrot/motivator, or stick/negative consequence that helps you maintain a new habit for a month!
I hope these tips are useful!
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