I've Made It To Day 30 of the #CTPContent Challenge !!

Well here it is at last! The thirtieth consecutive day of publishing blog posts with the #ctpcontent tag.

Last month @jongolson and @blainjones set the CTP community a 30-day blogging challenge which coincided nicely with the college summer vacation here in Hiroshima.

HabitBull Helped Too

It was also very good timing for me because I had just downloaded the HabitBull app. I added "Blogging on CTP Talk" as one of the five daily habits that the free version of the app allows you to set up, and that gave me an extra incentive to "keep going" even on days when I really, really, didn't feel like pumping out yet another blog post!

As well as completing the blogging challenge, for the last thirty days I have also managed to complete four additional "daily habits" with the gentle prodding of the HabitBull app.

My Four Other Daily Habits

1. "Mini Physical Workout": The minimum requirement was just 10 press-ups, but most days I added some extra exercises to either side of the press-ups. I've also built up to 16 press-ups a day, and haven't dropped back down to the bare minumum for several days now. [Note to self: I need to raise the bar on this habit. I guess I could set the bare-minimum to 15 press-ups per day from now on...]

2. Chess study: I've made good progress in studying my opening repertoire for White over the last thirty days, and in another three days I will have gone through the whole of my repertoire. I'm not claiming to remember everything, but many of the variations and memory keywords have become a lot more familiar.

3. Promoting My Squeeze Page: I have posted emails on at least three safelists every single day for the last thirty days and on most days I have had at least one new subscriber - often two or more - join my mailing list.

4. Academic Reading / Language Study: For about three weeks I did some academic reading for a paper I am planning to write. Then, when that target was met, I switched the habit to focus on studying a foreign language for at least 30 minutes per day.

For the last few days I've had a very pleasant time working on five different languages, one per day, and cycling through them. The languages I'm working with are: Latin, Italian, German, French, Japanese, and (as a complete beginner) Korean (at the moment I'm learning Hangul, the Korean writing system).

Habits Add Structure to Your Day

What I've discovered over the last 30 days is that having "five daily habits" (in accordance with my "rule of five" - see my blog, https://top5programs for another instance of this) gives your day a clear and predictable structure.

Even if I do not do all five habits in the same order, or at the same time, each day, I KNOW that at some point during the day I need to get each of them done.

Take today, for example. It's been a pretty easy day. My only appointment was to teach an English class in the early afternoon. So in the morning I got my mini work out done before breakfast. Then, after breakfast, I worked on my chess variations. After that I studied Hangul for thirty minutes or so.

That took me up to lunch time. I prepared a light lunch and then charged off to teach my class.

Back at home a few hours later, I promoted my squeeze page on three safelists: GlobalSafelist, ListSurfing, and TheLastMailer.

All that remained was THIS blog post!

The point is that, once you have decided what your daily habits are, and got into the habit of doing them, you no longer need to expend any mental energy thinking about what you ought to do to make progress with the projects that are important to you.

Actually, I sometimes wonder if my five habits are not really just a cover to allow me to feel good about my laziness! Get the habits done and enjoy a lengthy and guilt-free afternoon snooze into the bargain!

Tangible Results?

I ought to have noted my stats before the start of the challenge to give you a precise "before and after" picture, but I didn't.

However, what I can say is that I have seen a big boost in mailing list subscribers, sales are also up, as is Adsense revenue on my blogs. Maybe sales and adsense revenue is a coincidence, but maybe not.

I've accumulated a lot of CTP and also broken through my recently set 2020 Hive target. Just 17 days ago I wrote that I was aiming to finish the year with 625 staked Hive, assuming I would be gaining just two Hive per week through the rest of the year. BUT a few days later I broke through that target and now have 652 Hive with a good chance of hitting 700 before the end of the year.

So, lots of positives in addition to the creation of good habits.

What Next...?

I am going to keep going with the blogging challenge for another three days to complete the CTP 30 Day Content Challenge calendar that I only filled in three days into the challenge. I still have one more video to create and three more Noise.Cash posts to complete before all the tasks I assigned myself will have been done.

However, next week marks the start of the autumn term at both my colleges, and I have been loaded up with classes! I have eight classes spread over four days of the week at one college, and six or seven (I forget how many!) spread over two days of the week at the other, so I may have to reduce the scope of my daily habits...

I want to keep on blogging regularly, but I will change the habit to include non-business topics that I will post to Hive communities, or directly on my Hive blog, as well as online business-related posts that I will continue to post on CTP Talk (but not every day).

Cheers for now!

David Hurley
#InspiredFocus

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