100 Days To Offload & Over-Saturation

13 May 2020 | ~3 minute read

I've been having a think about 100 Days To Offload, and I've decided to make some changes to the challenge.

The original plan for #100DaysToOffload was that participants will publish a blog post every days (or close to it) for 100 days. I knew from the start that this would be a difficult thing to accomplish, but that's the point of a challenge, right?

Now that I'm nearly 3 weeks into the challenge, another issue has come to light that I hadn't considered previously...

Over-Saturation

I've had no issues with inspiration for content - the vast amount of bloggers taking part has provided plenty of that. But 1 day isn't a lot of time to produce a well-written post.

When writing a post, I usually come up with an idea, then dump it into my drafts. I then spend some time arranging my thoughts and fleshing the idea out.

Once I've done that, I write the post, do an initial edit, then come back to it a day or so later with fresh eyes to give it a second edit. Only then do I hit the publish button.

This isn't feasible if I'm publishing 1 post per day, and it shows. Well, I feel like it shows anyway, as the quality of my posts has taken a dramatic decline in the last few weeks.

My stats don't reflect that though. I'm still getting good readership numbers; but I feel I'm producing lower quality posts than my normal content.

Changes To The Challenge

With the above in mind, I've decided to make some changes to the challenge, which are live on the 100 Days website right now.

The rationale behind the whole thing is to challenge people to publish 100 posts on their personal blog in a year. That's approximately 1 post every 3.5 days.

100 Days To Offload

So instead of 1 post a day for 100 days, I'm going to be challenge myself to produce 100 posts in a year. I think this is a happy medium between being difficult to complete, and providing quality content.

What About Me?

Some people appear to be having no issues with the #100DaysToOffload challenge in its original form.

If you want to continue doing 100 posts in 100 days, go for it!

The challenge is now to publish 100 posts in 365 days, but if you can do it in 100 days, more power to you. If you do it 150 days, 200 days or 300 days; it doesn't matter.

What's important here is to motivate people to write more. That's all.

Conclusion

I said from the start that I hadn't put much thought into #100DaysToOffload, and that the guidelines for the challenge are exactly that - they're guidelines, not hard and fast rules.

I'm still enjoying the challenge, and I hope this change will ensure the challenge remains fun throughout.

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