Ask HN: What is your experience with 'doing something' daily challenges?

The most positively life changing one for me was the Whole 30: http://whole30.com/

I was doing the 750 words writing challenge for several months. (http://750words.com/ for example.) It was pleasant, and I used it as a good time to write explicitly about things I was thinking about. I used it to make a lot of self-evaluations (eg: which purchases have I made recently were worthwhile and which were not? What does that tell me about what I should buy in the future? The answer for me was that upgrades weren't worth it unless there was significant frustration caused by the item it was upgraded. Going from an OK mouse to a nice one doesn't change anything even though it feels like it will. But going from a mouse where the right button doesn't register half the time to an OK mouse is worth it.)

I worry that it might have reinforced some thoughts I was having at the time that were counter-productive, and in the end opening up to a friend was more beneficial than writing about it. YMMV

I've been having a good experience with duolingo so far. The lessons are short enough to not impose, and the difficulty curve is very low, so I don't dread getting everything wrong. I've been at it for two months, and have never missed more than one day at a time. I doubt I'll ever achieve fluency with the app alone, but I'd feel comfortable as a tourist.

This is somewhat surprising to me, as I've tried (and failed) to build a daily habit of journaling and mindful meditation, but they never stuck for more than a couple weeks, despite only being 10 minutes a day.

Im vlogging everyday. Every. Day. Its hard. Not all content is great. But Im learning a lot and making progress. Results so far have been better than I thought. People are starting to engage my content. Ive also motivated others to vlog as well. You should try it.

I wrote 1000 words a day for three months and had the rough draft of a novel to show for it. Felt pretty good, it was the combo of "get 1000 on the paper" and "it's ok if it's dog shit" that really helped me get it

For the last two years I have been doing well formed pull-ups almost everyday. I could not do a single pull-up on Dec 31, 2014. Today I can do 5 perfect formed pull-ups.

I make it a habit to program everyday. At least one git commit. Jerry Seinfeld was famous for using his Calendaring system of marking an X for everyday he committed to his challenge. "Don't break the chain!"

Some years ago I started drawing or painting every day. 15 minutes some days, hours on others. I've always done artwork, but never quite been this prolific. It wasn't really a formal thing to begin with, just something I started doing one day.

And am quite happy with the results.

My art improved and is probably more creative. Not only that, but I started taking more risks and moving out of my comfort zone. Some days, I just don't know what to draw when I'm staring at the paper - like writers block. But I make a few lines anyway and see what I can build from there.

I don't know if I'm surprised at results or not, just pleased.

From my experience .... for example daily writing improved my thinking and articulating ideas and thoughts.

Also design and making hardware staff with wood and steel improved my imagination and thinking about how things works.

You don't see overnight success...but if you compare your outcome from three of eight years ago you will see amazing difference in quality.

How long it take? It depends on area. Something can be mastered within hours, something within years. Do you know 10,000 hour rule? It is exactly what you are looking for.

So, answer is yes...practice makes perfect.

For the past year, I have done a little bit of arithmetic with my son every day. Mostly from the Kumon series of books.

It's been a great activity to both spend time together and give him a handle on something most kids fear. I don't push him too hard but I am absolutely consistent here. We do a few add/sub/mul questions every day, and even though he gets to pick the number of questions, I pick that they are asked and eventually answered.

I don't want to humblebrag about how he's doing, but this was the best choice I could have made as a parent.

I have started this yesterday : 30 Day Vanilla JS Coding Challenge [0]. Learning vanilla JS with some pretty cool projects.

I have also had a lot of free time lately so I have tried to build a few small things: simple web applications, IoT, crytpo experiments, hybrid mobile apps...

It is useful to keep busy...

[0] https://javascript30.com/

I decided to blog every day about my open source shell project, and I did it for 10 days straight at first, and was doing it multiple times a week for over a month.

It helped me break up a lot of longer articles I wanted to write into daily "deadlines". In that sense it was a success; it took significant work but I got in the rhythm.

I've only blogged once in the last week, but that's because I mostly wrote about what I wanted to. Now I have to do some more coding in order to have things to write about.

I just checked the logs and people seem to be still reading it despite the fact that I haven't promoted it lately. And I've gotten some e-mails and feedback about it, so I think it went well. Next step is to set up a comments section.

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/

I try these challenges often! As a corporate worker, I can usually fit self-directed routines into my life without much trouble. "Don't break the chain" psychology also works well on me.

When I was a scrawny 25 year old, I started doing a 7-minutes-per-day fitness challenge with help from an app.[0] This was easy enough to do before jumping into the shower in the morning, and the privacy was nice since the amount of push-ups I could do without visibly struggling was truly shameful. After a few months I felt I was able to do these basic bodyweight exercises very easily, and I was ready to join a strength training group at the gym. I finished the 7 months anyway, even though I outpaced it when I started using weights. Nowadays I just hit the gym two or three times a week, and have been doing this for a couple years.

I also use Duolingo[1] and have streaked into the hundreds of days a few times. It's fun and easy to do, but unfortunately requires an Internet connection. No, I didn't become fluent from Duolingo. I also don't think it helped me learn new words. The examples just aren't that memorable! However, it does provide a place to practice and corrects your errors.

I tried another system of language learning[2], also involving daily practice, which has gotten me to the conversational level in the past 8 months. This has exceeded my expectations! I was never conversational even after 3 years of Spanish classes in high school. This takes far less time, and I think my memory for Spanish words is quite good nowadays! Some flash cards I've made to remember idioms have been useful in conversation, and certainly surprised folks I speak to in Spanish!

Many years ago I did a special diet called Bulletproof[3] on a whim after reading about it while surfing HN. I ended up sticking with it for almost a year. It's tough because you basically can't eat any sugar. I got really lean, which was interesting, but not a good look for me. The coffee recipe is excellent. It's a very interesting experience. It's obvious that but by far the most challenging. My body was very different by the end of it; drinking half of a PBR would make me very drunk and very sick.

[0] http://perigee.se/apps/seven/

[1] https://www.duolingo.com/

[2] https://fluent-forever.com/

[3] https://blog.bulletproof.com/start-the-bulletproof-diet/

I've been writing Morning Pages (3 x A4 pages, hand-written) every day for almost three years. Sometimes I do them in the afternoon or evening, or right before bed.

Sometimes I'll only do one page, sometimes ten... A month or two ago I spent a month writing about 20 pages a day of "morning pages" after a few intense experiences.

After a month or so I didn't need to think about it any more, and now I can't imagine not doing it. Every morning, wake up, make coffee, write, then start the day. I find my life is richer and deeper as a result.

My daily habits are one of the best parts of my life. Without them, I feel like I'm running in sand in life. With them, I feel like I have solid foundation to build on. With a few challenging ones, I feel like I'm building on bedrock.

I've coined the term sidcha for Self-Imposed Daily Challenging Healthy Activity and written about the concept: http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/self-imposed-daily-cha...

My main challenging habits are

- Burpees, daily

- Blog posts, daily

- Cold showers, every fourth day

I did my first set of daily burpees December 22, 2011 and haven’t missed one since, so I’m about to enter my 6th year of that habit, nearing 80,000 cumulative burpees. I've written about it: http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/burpees

I started posting daily on my blog, http://joshuaspodek.com, in January 2011 and haven’t missed a day since, so I’m about to enter my 7th year of that habit, nearing 2,500 cumulative posts. Here's an archive of all the posts: http://joshuaspodek.com/archives

I took my first cold shower in December 2013. I did them daily for a month and every fourth day since, so I just started my 4th year of doing them regularly, nearing 300 of them cumulatively. My posts about it: http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/cold-showers-rock#30-d...

Less challenging habits include things like brushing and flossing daily, cooking healthy meals daily, and others that aren’t as remarkable, though I’ve done them longer. The last time I went to sleep without brushing my teeth would have been in college, which would be around 1990.

Come to think of it, if you count not eating meat as a habit, I’ve eaten no meat since 1990.

I ran every single day from August 27 - November 27.

First month 3 miles every day, then 5, then 7, then mix 5/7, then 10 everyday for over 10 days.

There are a lot of other "daily rituals" I have added in the past 6-9 months including vitamin supplements daily (fish oil, B (12 or energy complex); C; D). But what triggered the daily running was my discovery of raw, green vegetable juice and followed thereafter by daily eating of daily salad(s). Basically I attributed the ability to do the daily running with the daily juicing. I never felt so good so I just tried short runs everyday to start and kept adding miles, by the time I was doing 10 mile bridge runs back to back to back and not experiencing and aches/pains/soreness even I was curious how far I could take it (maybe train for my first ultra).

The only reason I stopped running daily was because of a stye that got badly infected, and I took about 10 days off. I am back running everyday so wish me luck.

I get up every day. I go to work every day. I listen to music that I like every day. I make music. I make things every day. I write code every day. I manage people every day. I care about my family every day.

The hardest thing for me every day is actually caring about anything. Because I don't really care. I pretend to care. But I don't really.

Because I don't want to be here. I'm just stuck.

I've been learning french on Duolingo for a about a year now. Usually I take one or two 5 minute lessons per day for a week and then spend a week "strengthening skills" (reviewing old material). It says I am on 54% fluency atm.

A few weeks ago I tried going though a math course in french (Initiation à la théorie des distributions on Coursera) and was surprised that I actually managed to understand it. (although I have to listen to it at 1x speed and with french subtitles so it is much slower than leaning in english)

Had left my job over 4 years back and since then have been doing different things time to time. Freelancing, practicing different hobbies. But during this whole time despite achieving moderate success I lost my daily habits and routine. Realizing what was happening to me I have started to be very conscious of what I plan to do everyday and what I achieve. Something as small as cleaning my house to finishing up a trello task for my projects is absolutely worth it. It has not been very long yet but its motivating enough to take it far.

I've recently started following the routine described in the 'Miracle Morning' book (hate the name) and it's been pretty great.

I was adamant at first but turns out the benefits are there. Never before I've looked forward in waking up at 5am everyday.

Rewarding, can be a little draining, easy to fall of the wagon. I did a processing sketch a day for 30 days. I time boxed it at 20 minutes, which always went over, but that was the target. It was invigorating to have a creative _task_ to do everyday. If I didn't do it in the morning, I'd think about it all day.

I've meditated for the last 3 months. I've realized I'm much calmer around generally and can concentrate better on just one thing. I have a calendar on an A4 paper printed out and cross out each day when I meditate.

Since a new year is starting and I need a new calendar I've made a page that generates a calendar that you can print out. Maybe it's usefull for somebody http://printchaincalendar.com/

I've been running 4km+ every day in December; planning to get over 1000km this year. Really looking forward to a day off now though.

All the treadmill sessions merge into one, sometimes I've mixed up the morning with the night before.

I thought it'd be easier - finding the time is the hard part.