One Month Challenge - Revised and Restarted

After failing my challenge for the second time a couple of weeks ago I have now returned from a holiday in the South of France refreshed and ready to try again.

One of the important goals of a challenge such as this is to honestly evaluate the habits that are being formed and see if they work and if they make sense. My original challenge had three components:

1. To exercise for 30 minutes per day
   
2. To do web development for an hour a day
3. To read a personal development book for 30 minutes a day

Having tried this challenge a couple of times and failed, I thought it wise to re-evaluate before starting it again for the third time. The first two goals are still absolutely crucial for me but I've decided to drop the third one.

Reading of personal development material is important to me because it keeps my mind in a positive state, it encourages me to continually think about what is important in my life and so on. However, I have found that recently I get a lot of this kind of material in the form of email newsletters and blogs. I am easily spending around 20-30 minutes a day just trying to keep up to date with my blogs and one of the benefits to this is that I am getting material from a wide variety of sources so its always fresh and interesting.

I'd like to read good books as well but as time is at a premium for me at the moment I've decided to cut the books for now and just read the blogs - but they do not form part of my challenge.

Also, I'm making one small tweak, well a simplification really. My original challenge required that I exercise for a minimum of 30 minutes a day. I'm going to simplify that to simply "Exercise Daily". The reason for this is that many of my exercise sessions are pre-determined by their content rather than time spent. For example, if I go and do my run (as I did this morning yay!) and it takes me 25 minutes to complete my route and return back home it would be silly to try and do some other kind of exercise to fill out the extra 5 minutes. Instead, I'll just plot out a longer route for next time. Similarly I do weight training several times a week and I do a handful of exercises in each session. The sessions usually take around half an hour but I'm not going to try to fit something else in if I get through it a few minutes early.

The important aspect of challenges like these is to identify the reasons behind the activities that the challenge contains. In the case of my exercise routine, what I am really trying to achieve here is to make exercise a part of my daily lifestyle so that it doesn't feel like an effort to do it. Whether I do 20, 30 or 40 minutes actual activity is not really the goal - the underlying objective is to form the exercise habit.

To summarise then, my new challenge, starting today the 1st July (oh, how convenient!) is as follows:

1. To exercise daily
2. To do web development for an hour a day

Let's see if I can last the whole month this time.