So I came across those 30-Day-Challenges by listening to a TED talk. It’s something that can help you to motivate yourself, get things done and increase your self-confidence through a sense of achievement, when you finally finish your challenge.
Challenges can be about things that you always wanted to try or skills that you want to improve. It could be as simple as take a photo every day, or learn a new scale on an instrument, or write something every day so by the end of the month you can have a whole novel if you stick with it.
You can basically do anything, but it would be good to start with simple achievable goals and then later you can do stuff like write a song every day, or a simple game or some artwork.
My First Challenge: Daily Morning Walks
So I decided to start with something simple: I will take a walk every morning for about an hour before I get to work. I don’t get out to often and an occasional Vitamin D boost cannot hurt. Also, this walk should be without music or other distractions on my mind, because there’s usually to little time for me spent on thinking without influence of music and podcasts.
Drawing
Since I also find walks by itself incredibly boring I want to draw something every day in my sketchbook; be it a church I walk by, some beautiful alley or maybe some bike on the sidewalk, anything I find interesting at the moment. This is good opportunity to refresh my rudimentary drawing skills and also improve on them, what I always aspire to do, but never bring myself to actually do it.
Setting Goals
In the end of the walk I also want to set my goals for the day:
- What tasks do I need/want to finish today? (Small achievable tasks)
Especially at home I often have the problem that I don’t have a clear goal of what I want to achieve each day. Just some really vague long term goals, like finish this game, finish this site, work on this and work on that, but nothing specific. On the other hand when I define clear goals I often wake up with energy and eager to start to work on something, so I think setting goals everyday could be beneficial as a self-improvement strategy for me.
Let’s see how this works out…
Starting tomorrow!
I can do it! chanting
Peace out, Thursday, 09.01.2014