Why am I doing my 30 day challenge?

Why do we only make resolutions at New Year?

On New Year’s Day 2016, I was hopelessly hungover. I’d wasted most of the day in bed trying to recover. By the time the evening came I decided to get out of the house and get some fresh air.

I walked around the neighbourhood for a while before popping into my favourite pub to administer some hair-of-the-dog treatment.

Pensively, I sat alone; nursing my beer. That’s when I began to question the fixation of using the first day of the year as the trigger to setting new goals.

If a date in the calendar is something that we seem to need to motivate us, then why not choose a date that’s more frequent than a year?

With this in mind, I decided that I’d aim to do something different for 30 days, every 30 days — making 12 challenges for this year. The prerequisites were that:

• it had to be something I really wanted to do
• it had to be a goal that would specifically benefit from 30 consecutive days of practice

Simple. And 30 days felt like a significant enough period of time for me to get better at something without growing tired of it.

Next I needed to set some helpers:

• I’d follow Seinfeld’s strategy of “don’t break the chain” — results didn’t matter, just consistency. And I’d keep a visual representation of my chain stuck to the mirror.
• I’d “never miss twice” — another widely accepted tactic to habit-building and procrastination-beating. I’d be allowed to miss a day, but never two in a row.
• My reward (aside from actually completing my goal) would be telling people how it had gone, and what I’d achieved, by writing about it in this blog. And with that came the added pressure of visible failure if I don’t follow through with my challenge.

Now I had one New Year’s Resolution, but could potentially have 12 completed goals…