A few lessons learned about writing for 30 days

So my personal challenge is almost up, with a month coming up tomorrow (I think I may have a few days left to write to get to 30 full days...) And there are a couple of things I've learned from my daily habit:

• Coming up with a new, interesting idea every day is tough.  There are some days where I want to take a picture of a sandwich, or post a link to an article, or something more fit for a social post somewhere.  But coming up with a lot of thoughtful things to say on a daily basis is hard.
• It's hard to come up with ideas on work days.  Not a whole lot new happens during a long day of the same ol' same ol'.  Plus, fewer free hours in the day to write / take pictures of stuff.
• It takes a long time to write the posts themselves.  It's an hour-plus to write, and if you're strapped for time, sometimes you have to quickly write something out before the end of the day.  Maybe if you don't have to write every day, you can let posts "brew" over a couple of days and get something well-crafted out.
• You can't always write what you really want to say, mostly because it will be public forever.  So I would sometimes start writing furious rants just to stop myself and back off to write something else (except in the case of texting and driving).  Maybe that was therapy in itself?
• Sharing on G+ generated far more traffic than not sharing.  So I would sometimes not share on days I knew it would be really short / boring to spare people from G+ feed spam.
• Motivation is high at the beginning and at the end.  Maybe I had a lot of writing topics ready to go at the beginning -- it's different and new.  And by the end, it was old hat and the light was visible at the end of the tunnel.  But the middle is what required the consistent reminder and daily routine to build up the motivation.

Anyways, I still want to write, and going through this experience has made me want to write consistently.  However, I don't think I could do it every day.  I'd save up my most interesting thoughts and maybe post every couple of days.

I do have several options of things I can do for 30 days once this challenge is over, and I have yet to decide between them:

• Write some code every day.  I'd have to get my dev environment up to speed, but man, I'd love to get some hacking in every day
• Do 100+ shoulder pass-throughs with my PVC every day.  This would greatly help with my terrible shoulder mobility
• Come up with 3-10 ideas every day (even if they're bad).  I had a few previous posts on this that showed my terrible "ideation range"
• Take a photo/video every day.  I certainly don't take enough, and I'd like to leave them all for my kids to see one day
• Meditate / breathe thoughtfully for some amount of time every day.  I had a former boss who did this every day and it certainly helped focus and de-stress, it would be nice to do with all of the stress that I get from work these days (probably worth a post of its own -- maybe tomorrow)

Anyways, I'm digging the challenge of doing something every day for 30 days, now I get why it can have such an impact on your life -- the muscle memory and consistency of doing something every day makes it part of your daily routine.  I'd recommend it for you too, it will make you a better person!