Do you ever find your mind is faster at coming up with suggestions than you’re physically capable of acting on?
It happens to me all the time. This morning I had the brain wave that it might be cool to set myself a goal of blogging 100 words a day for 100 days. Fits in nicely with the theme of the blog: My 100 Goals, and may actually be a useful primer to get myself blogging again.
I’ve some form with 100 words a day goals. After reading 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself back in 2008, I set myself the task of completing my first novel Fallen Warriors within four years by writing a minimum of 100 words a day. Nine years later… Fallen Warriors has been published and quite a lot of those 100 words made it into the final draft.
I know I can write 100 words a day. In fact, I suspect anyone can write 100 words a day. It’s a tiny amount. Just three short paragraphs. In fact – my word count is showing I’m already at 167 words and counting just for this post alone!
The difficulty is not in writing 100 words a day, but in the consistency of the habit. It’s the maintaining the discipline over a long period of time.
And that is one reason I’d really like to take this challenge on – Anything that helps me to build positive habits into my life is a good thing.
When I set out to complete Fallen Warriors back in 2008, I wasn’t able to maintain that daily habit past a couple of months. Yet, I stuck with the writing and am pleased with the result. Even better, readers seem almost as excited as I was with the story!
Why do I want to write 100 words a day for 100 days?
- It will get me into the habit of regular blogging.
- It will train me to write daily.
- It will give me something to Tweet and post on my Facebook page!
- It will allow me to start sharing my thoughts again.
- It’s a goal connected with 100, which I just love…
What will I need for the journey?
- A plan!
- Ideas.
- Support
- Commitment
A plan
As I kept thinking about 100 words in 100 days, it occurred to me that it would be easier if I broke down that huge number into manageable chunks. Say 10 blog posts on a topic.
Some topic ideas that quickly occurred to me were:
- Blogging about goals
- Book Reviews
- Fallen Warriors
- Thoughts about God and Jesus and faith
Here are a few more I’ve just thrown in there…
- The Great Scottish Land Grab
- 100 Crazy Ideas to Fix the Economy
- Thoughts about our crazy political world
- Gardening
- Exercise/keeping fit
- Work
With only a few minutes work, I’ve created a broad outline plan for how I can complete my goal. All I need to do is blog daily on one of these ten topics for 100 words and I’ll complete my goal.
Ideas
Ideas are mostly fairly easy for me, but the fact is that I can also dry up completely. Perhaps that is writer’s block. It is more likely to happen when I’m over-tired, working too hard, stressed, not exercising…
Setting a 100 day commitment is a commitment to a marathon!
Still, I can jot down ideas as they occur and if on a given day, I’m blank, I can review my high level topics in the hope an idea will occur. And maybe, just maybe, what I really need to do that day is record how I’m feeling and try and work out why.
Commitment
I know I can commit to and achieve long term goals. I’ve been doing so my whole adult life. What I often struggle with is the daily grind. The temptation to slack off, to leave things for a day which turns into a week, a month, a year. I can’t do that with my day job, but when I’m not being held accountable for achieving goals, it is difficult to maintain that focus and commitment.
I will commit to this goal.
Support
Your support would make a great deal of difference. Commenting on my posts, letting me know what you think would help a lot.
However, I need to be really careful here. My most important supporters are my family and while I’m writing this post in April – I don’t think I should make a commitment to following through with it until late May. Members of my family are going through end of year exams over the next three weeks and so I need to be supporting them, not asking for their support!
So, I’ll make a commitment to starting this goal on 22 May 2017. 100 days later will be 29 August 2017.
Limitations
I’m not going to write on Sundays. I need a day off each week. So, I’ll aim to write twice as much every Saturday!
And that’s it. I’m going to schedule this to post a week before I’m due to start. I’m going to start jotting down notes and ideas. It would be great to have you join me on the journey and if you’re up for it, join me in taking the 100 words, 100 days challenge too!
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