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Tiny Challenges


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Last September I blogged every day.

My friend Jaimee Newberry had challenged people to join her in a tiny challenge and post something every day. I decided to post advice to writers each day.

I've gone on blogging binges before. I used to celebrate November's NaNoWriMo month with daily posts about writing because I was encouraging folks who wrote for the Pragmatic Programmers or folks who wanted to, to play along and write a technical non-fiction book during the month.

I really enjoyed spending the month writing daily. This sort of writing helps me surface ideas and tells me a lot about what I need to be doing next.

I said yesterday that I won't be making resolutions this year, but if I were to make resolutions, one of them would be to post more often.

Some of the projects I worked on in the past were coming to their natural end - at least for me. One of them was the CocoaConf podcast. I've passed it on to Cesare Rochi and almost immediately missed producing audio.

Jaimee and I were at a conference together and chatted about "well maybe we should join up and do a podcast".

We bounced emails back and forth and agreed on what sort of podcast we wanted to do (helpful and uplifting - not specifically about tech). We wanted to support this meme that we each believe in of making small changes by embracing projects for a while. I did this back when I was trying to start a new imprint for the Prags in some of the articles I wrote for their magazine. Jaimee is doing this through her Tiny Challenges.

At one point it became clear that we should launch a Tiny Challenges show (subscribe here on iTunes). In fact, my tiny challenge for December was to prepare those elements that were on my half of the to-do list to make this happen. Jaimee did a lot of work on her side to get the web site prepared, find somewhere to host the audio, find a sponsor, and get the show up and running on iTunes.

We succeeded and posted the first episode of season one on New Year's Eve day. We will spend the month of January trying to come up with three words to live by in 2016. As I told Jaimee in this episode - the challenge is harder than you think. Last year I only came up with one word: Tell.

Tomorrow I'll share my first word for 2016.

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