365 Days Writing Challenge – Checkpoint Eight

Today is the last day of the eighth month of this year. From the first day of 2021, until now, I published a post every day on this blog. I still have 4 months to go, because the goal is to publish an article for 365 days.

At the end of each month, I do a small recap, trying to observe the pitfalls, the benefits and every other unexpected outcome of this experiment.

As it already appeared clear after the first half of the year, writing itself is not a chore anymore. It’s past the point where I have to struggle. In August I wrote mainly in the morning, even before starting work, so the rest of the day went without any writing pressure. I find it easy now to just set a title, know a little bit of the structure and just write ahead. After so many days of doing it, the words are just finding their ways with minimal effort from my part.

In August I also wrote a Monday Moving Forward article every Monday, which I think it’s a premiere (didn’t check, to be honest, not a biggie). This tells me that it’s easier to follow certain structures. It’s important because one of my expectations from this challenge is to end up with a significant amount of “raw” material for some potential longer form content, books or essays. The Monday Moving Forward series appears to be a good candidate for that. I can see a small book built on top of this, there are already 14 “chapters” ready to be added to it.

But there are many other articles suitable for a book, with less structure at the title level, like in not part of a group, but part of a broader topic. I wrote significantly more about financial resilience in August, and also about meaningful relationships. This also confirms the pivoting of this blog (which happened as a result of this challenge too) from broad personal development, to a more targeted audience interested in financial resilience, location independence and meaningful relationships. Again, I can see from these more or less scattered articles some more structured content being made.

As for how much I wrote in advance, I think about 10% of the content was made in advance, or 3 articles, the rest was written on the spot.

All in all, the challenge is going extremely well, and I’m very happy with the results so far.

Onward and upwards!




Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.