Challenges are fun isn’t it? In my case, it really was interesting. I took the 7 day pure self-discipline challenge last week (on 3rd June). The challenge ended yesterday and here is the result.
What did I challenge myself to do?
I followed this post written by Glen Allsop in his blog on pure self-discipline and challenged myself the following three things:
1. One blog post everyday in this blog for seven days
2. No twitter
3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)
The Results:
1. One blog post everyday for seven days
This one didn’t come out like I wished. I was supposed to write 7 posts (one everyday). But I ended up writing only 4 posts. But hey, 4 posts in 7 days is better than 1 post a week. It was quite hard to write one post a day since I’m not quite used to it.
This challenge helped me a lot and I’m sure my posting frequency will only get better. Also I’ll be concentrating on quality of blog posts.
2. No twitter
This one was a success. I didn’t post a single tweet for a full week. In fact I hadn’t posted for 2 days when I started the challenge. That makes 9 days of no tweeting. There were 3-4 tweets which were automated from Friendfeed. I disabled the automatic ‘friendfeed to twitter’ posting one day before the challenge ended.
This increased my productivity. I had time to accomplish a lot of things.
3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)
This went on well on all days except Saturday. On Saturday, I slept at 12PM and got up at only 8AM. That’s 8 hours. The rest of the days were pretty good. I didn’t sleep exactly at 11PM or get up exactly at 5AM but somewhat in that range.
This also helped me in becoming more productive. I had time to play football (or soccer if that’s how you call it) every morning with my friends and yet get my work done.
This challenge is surely a success. Now I can stay away from twitter whenever I wish and still be happy. I can get up early in the morning and be productive throughout the day.
Did you take up the challenge? Or will you be taking up the challenge? Please let me know your views in the comments. I’ll be glad to hear what you have got to share.
Image Source: My design for Twitter’s “over capacity” screen by Mykl Roventine
Congrats man. I agree that one post per day can be difficult, especially if you don’t have topics planned out.
It sounds like, overall, things worked out well for you.
Glen,
Yeah it has worked out well.
Thanks for starting the challenge. It helped me a lot to control myself over few things like twitter.
To be honest I think you would benefit more from sleeping 8 hours instead of 6. Since you will me so much more productive with a bit of more sleep you will easily gain those two hours during the day.
Good one! Nice that you did it. But wondering why Twitter abstinence was important?
I feel Twitter helps me in my blogging and nowadays I spend lesser time on RSS reader – thanks to Twitter.
So I would rather change to goals to – 1 hour on Twitter per day!
what say?