I have come to the realization that month-long challenges are not good for me. It’s a bummer because I always get so excited to start a challenge over the course of 30-days, but it always just ends up falling apart shortly after the halfway mark. There are several reasons for this: 1) trying to do something challenging for several weeks at a time is stressful and makes me anxious, 2) once I fall behind, it is nearly impossible for me to catch back up, and 3) at some point in the month my period hits, and nothing gets done during that time becuase I hurt and have to burrito on my couch.

During the month of April, I had taken on not one but two month-long challenges. The first was for Camp NaNo, which I had set a goal of 30,000 words for, and the second was an Instagram challenge of posting something about my writing career every day. Everything was going really well for the first two weeks. Not only was I keeping up with the challenges, but I was staying ahead. But then… my uterus reared its head and incapacitaded me for a few days, and then, after I recovered, I caught a stomach bug. With a full week gone by with nothing getting done, I was far too deep in the hole to dig myself out of. The stress of that created a big ol’ writers block in front of me every time I sat down to write.

So… what have I learned from all of this?

The biggest thing is what I mentioned at the beginning of this post: I cannot manage month-long challenges. Thinking back on it, I don’t think I have been successful with a month-long challenge since I left college and no longer fuel by Redbull and a fear of failture. But the question I was grappling with was “how am I ever going to be able to push myself to accomplish big goals with out this sort of challenge?” The answer is simpiler than I initially thought: just set shorter and/or longer goals.

My goals need to be made by day or week in short bite size chunks and these little goals will all be made to accomplish a bigger long term goal. For instance, instead of saying for the month of April that I’ll write 30,000 words, I will say, “Today I will write 1000 words” or “This week I’ll write 7,000 words.” It basically the same thing, I know, but the subtle differences will keep me from feeling bogged down and overwhelmed. In fact, I have a great tool on Scrivener where I can set the overall word count goal for my first draft (125,000 words) and then set the deadline for meeting that goal. Every day I pull up the document, it tells me how many words I need to write that day to keep up with the overall goal. This makes this waaaay less daunting and skipping a day or two does little to change the amount I’ll have to write the next time I sit down at the computer.

It’s a bit sad, but I have decided that this was the last time I will be challenging myself through NaNoWriMo. It will always hold a special place in my heart since it was what first encouraged me to be a novelist in the first place, but it has served its purpose in my life. I will still encourage people to challenge themselves with NaNoWriMo, especially those who are just starting out, but it is no longer a helpful tool for me.

And as for the month-long instagram challenge… I just don’t like talking about myself that much for that long on social media, so I think those are out, too.