Every year I have assigned challenges to myself …

• 2012 – 30 Psalms in 30 Days. This project lead to several Bible writing projects.
• 2015 – Transformed a 500-words-per-day-for-30-days challenge into writing 500 words per day for 60 days.
• 2016 – Wrote 1,000 words per day in various categories (ebooks, posts, spiritual essays, and daily journal).
• 2017 – Wrote a poem every day.
• Multi-year – Wrote out the Bible by hand over approximately 5 years.

Not all of these challenges were year-long projects, but I found even shorter efforts beneficial.

For 2021, I was fairly faithful in maintaining three daily challenges throughout the year.

Picture of the Day

My wife and I moved in to a new house in October 2020. A feature of our subdivision is a wide angle view of two mountains with river in between.

Early into January, I decided that it would be cool to take a picture of the sunrise every day and compress the pictures into a short video at the end of the year.

As you can see above, I earned an A for taking daily photos. I missed a few days due to travel and vacation, but was able to capture most sunrises, even on rainy days. The resulting video is below.

10-Lists

I heard a podcast in 2020 where someone discussed the idea of writing a list of ten items every day as a mental exercise. I’ve previously written about mental jogging and liked the idea of this brainstorming technique.

I was consistent with writing a list daily until mid-August. I decided to take a one week break, and that broke the momentum. I did not create many more lists after that.

Even though my consistency grade is a “C,” I found the exercise helpful as a way to develop content lists and action plans. Below is screenshot of a few lists.

Story of the Day

In Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks wrote about his experience noting daily at least one incident that occurred. The prompt he suggested is, “If I had to tell a story about today, what would it be?”

I found a small Paperblanks notebook with 176 pages and used it to record my stories. I skipped a few days throughout the year, but, overall, was satisfied with my consistency. In a year’s worth of days, it is surprising how many experiences you forget.

I enjoyed this challenge and have already started it for 2022. While I wrote out stories in a small notebook for 2021, I decided for this year to use Microsoft OneNote, where I can easily organize and find story content.

Find a Challenge

I encourage you to find something to do every day in 2022. It might be writing, drawing, exercising, or something else. In whatever area you choose, you will see improvement by the end of the year.