"the most productive part of the 30 minutes is the 30 minutes after"
As I am writing this, I am completing the last day of my 30 minutes a day for 7 days challenge. It was a great success. Here are some statistics:
I've never been this consistent on productive, non-work related projects over the course of a week. Seeing that I committed almost 5 hours towards things I am proud of made me happy and able to relax during dedicated leisure time.
There were two things that I attribute to the experiment being a success. First, the sessions only being 30 minutes really helped me commit to finishing each day. Because it's such a short time, on low-motivation days, it was easy to convince myself that a session won't be that painful. Second, posting my session summary on Twitter helped build accountability. That last thing I wanted to do was expose a failure to my many followers 😂.
My goal is to continue these session on a daily basis. If I miss a day, I will create a new goal for X amount of consecutive days. I also hope that my average session time increases, but that is something I will not be actively improving. I'm guessing that once this becomes a habit, I will naturally dedicate more time to each session.
If/when I hit 30 consecutive days, I will do another reflection like this. I'm excited to see what I accomplish during that time!