Lessons Learned from My Month-Long Writing Challenge
Time’s up! July is done, and so is my writing challenge. This experience has been an exercise in trusting my abilities and following my intuition. As the writer Anne Lamott said:
Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
What I Did
Starting on July 1, I challenged myself to a bounded experiment. Each weekday during the month, I committed to spend 20 minutes writing and then post the results as an article on LinkedIn. I began with a backlog of topic ideas and selected one topic each day as my writing prompt. My goal was to share my thoughts openly and honestly, without overthinking the process.
How I Did It
People often ask me how I manage to stay so productive. For me, it's about willpower, determination, and habit formation. Time management is always important, but with this extra obligation every day, I needed to be especially careful.??
Each morning, I would finalize my topic and reflect on it occasionally throughout the day. I wouldn't start writing, though, until after dinner. At that point, I would crack open a google doc and begin writing until I felt the piece was complete. Once I was satisfied with it, I would move the draft to LinkedIn, add a picture, and schedule it to go live the next morning. To avoid perfectionism, I deliberately chose not to edit any of my work post-publication.
I followed this routine nearly every weekday in July, except for a three-day trip to Vegas, where I wrote my articles in advance to enjoy a proper break. Dedication is important, but so is making time for fun.
What Was Difficult
I ended up spending more time on this challenge than I initially planned. My readership grew larger than I had expected, which made me feel like I ought to publish more polished work. I stopped setting a 20-minute timer after the first week and allowed myself to take more time when I needed it. I wasn't upset about spending extra time writing, but it was unexpected.?
Also, publishing on social media brought me a sense of pressure. I felt the need to always be "on" for my audience. Although I enjoyed getting all of the feedback through likes and comments, it was also draining. Despite the difficulties, I appreciated the "choose your own adventure" style of serialized writing and the resulting engagement with my readers.
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What Was Joyful
It was empowering to take up space and express myself. This writing challenge gave me a platform to be heard, and I did it entirely for myself. My ideas came from various sources: past public talks, conversations with friends, and books written by others, which I built upon with my own opinions. I still have a long list of topic ideas that I haven’t explored yet.
I enjoyed injecting my personality and humor into my writing, something my usual business narrative doesn’t often allow. It was fun to experiment with different writing styles and address a diverse audience from various backgrounds and levels of expertise. I found that I gravitated toward material that blends personal anecdotes, practical advice, and humor to make complex topics accessible and relatable. That's my voice.
What I Wrote
This is everything, all 12,000 words of it, in chronological order. I’ve marked five of my favorite articles with asterisks (***).
What’s Next
I've decided to continue my newsletter with a biweekly schedule. I’ll continue to write about excellence in analytics, with specific topics depending on which way the wind blows.?
Credits
Thank you to everyone who cheered me on all month. I couldn’t have done this without you. I especially want to thank Jim Sterne , Rawi Nanakul , John Lovett , Gary Angel , Donna Strok , Shailvi Wakhlu , Oren Yunger , Yao Morin, Ph.D. , Matthew Shump , Shane Murray , Barr Moses , Akin Arikan , Allison Hartsoe , Boyan Angelov , Kelly Wortham , and Matt Gershoff . Whether you knew it or not, you inspired me.
SVP Analytics and Data Strategy
7 个月It's true, this series has been much too good for LinkedIn!
Data Practice Lead | Analytics Engineer | AI and Data Strategist | Decision Process Enabler | Performance Evaluator
7 个月This was an amazing month! Thank you!
Founder, SaaS Pimp and Automation Expert, Intercontinental Speaker. Not a Data Analyst, not a Web Analyst, not a Web Developer, not a Front-end Developer, not a Back-end Developer.
7 个月I didn't realise that it was only for a month. I wondered how long you could sustain the cadence of one article per day. I started writing once a week just over 2 years ago after the first MeasureCamp London after the lockdowns, the first one where we all met in person again. I now find that I rarely know what I will write about the following Sunday after scheduling my article for publication. Yet, I find lessons for Digital Analytics practitioners all around us in our daily lives however mundane they may be. It can be spotting a small wind turbine measuring wind speed at the corner of the scaffolding for a music stage at an open-air event. How will the wind speed influence the decision to stop for set due to safety concerns? Can data-influenced decision-making only work if we decide beforehand what the threshold for action is and agree on what that action should be? Or 3 men walking in formation through that same crowd a year later. One holds the camera, one is a sound engineer and the third one helps them walk through the attendance. A metaphor for how we should split our work between analysts, implementation specialists and data translators? It's all the random stuff that gives me inspiration for an article.
Helping Asian immigrant women and leaders build a career & life they are proud of, even more so than their parents
7 个月I've been LOVING all these posts, June! I also love that you weave in humor into many of them, making them all so personable, relatable, entertaining, and practical. Looking forward to keep reading your future posts! p.s. my favorites are "Data Quality is all your fault", and "How to ace work effort estimates". Brought me chuckles ??