One month of daily blogging - what I originally called NaBloWriMo1 - is officially over. In this post, I would like to summarize my experience and what I learned from this experiment.

In the beginning, I was hyped. Finding topics and writing the posts felt easy and it was a lot of fun. I even wrote some longer posts without planning it; I simply started writing and the post ended up around 1500 to 2000 words. Some of my friends became avid readers and after adding comments to the blog, we had some fun interactions there.

Learning #1: Blogging is fun for me!

However, at about the halfway point, I started struggling to find new topics every day. For the sake of the challenge, I continued to write and publish every single day, but the initial honeymoon period was over. Thinking of a new topic every day became more of a chore, and I started looking forward to the end of the month.

Learning #2: Consistently finding new topics to write about isn’t easy.

It was not like I didn’t have any more ideas what to write about. But those things I wanted to get into, at least those that were left, were all things that would take time to research and write. It wouldn’t have been able for me to write such a post in a day without sacrificing all the rest of the things I like to do (as well as work).

I believe a better strategy is to set out to write every day, but not publish every day. Then I could work on those longer posts, but take my time to make them good. Of course, that was not the goal of this challenge.

Learning #3: Writing every day is good, but having to publish every day is a lot of pressure.

The goal of this challenge was to get back into writing. And I definitely achieved that. Not only did I write a post every day, I feel like I wrote more and better outside of those posts as well (e.g. in my daily journal). I also improved a lot throughout this month.2

In the end, I’m very happy that I challenged myself to do this. I am grateful that I am flexible enough in my life to devote a chunk of each day to such a challenge, and I’m also grateful for you, the readers. Without anyone reading, I would still have done it, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun. Apart from the public comments, I also received some private feedback and thoughts about certain posts, especially about those thought-provoking ones.

Thank you for reading my blog! I really appreciate it. While I will take a break from blogging for a while3, I certainly don’t plan to abandon this blog. Since I’m planning to do more weekly or monthly challenges, expect posts about that fairly soon. I also want to get back into a bunch of other things (like app development and YouTube), so I’m going to use this blog to keep you up-to-date with what I’m doing.

  1. National Blog Writing Month ↩

  2. Although it feels like those improvements were very visible over the first two weeks, but then the struggle of posting every day also became apparent in the quality of my writing. ↩

  3. Spoiler: There will be another post later today. ↩