{Z} Zen and the art of blogging

Finally, it’s the penultimate post of the A to Z challenge! I never thought it would get this difficult, and I never thought I would manage to persevere, what with the crazy schedule at work and the craziness of writing a blog post each and every day. But this month of daily blogging, of stretching myself to the max, has thought me a lot – about blogging and about life.

1. It pays to plan: Before April rolled around, I had already drawn up a list of blog post ideas with almost all the letters and had also scheduled 2 weeks’ worth of posts. This made the start of the challenge easy, and I was able to use a couple of weekends in April to write and schedule more posts and go visit fellow participants. That early momentum powered me through the rest of the month, when the going got tougher and tougher. I wasn’t always able to spread the blog love, but I wrote a post a day, which is the main reason why I joined up for the challenge.
   Zenitude: When you have a why, you can achieve anything!
2. Do what you humanly can: Part of the challenge involved blog hopping and commenting. I kept up with the commenting for as long as I could, but on the days when it was too overwhelming (which was essentially mid-April onwards), I just did what I could. I’ll go catch up on posts slowly now, when I have the time to actually read and leave intelligent comments. Giving myself some slack here meant that I didn’t totally burn out, and was able to juggle the various things that came up this month.
   Zenitude: Work within your limitations, without beating yourself up, and you’ll accomplish more than you thought was possible.
3. But don’t give up: I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to give up! But I didn’t. I wrote entire posts and designed graphics to go with it on my phone, I wrote a post outline before going to sleep and fleshed it out when I woke up, but I didn’t give up. The high I am feeling now, on completing the challenge, is immense. To top it all, this month of blogging every day on a huge variety of topics helped me break out of the blogging inertia that had set in, which is a plus!
   Zenitude: Stretch yourself in new ways, challenge the status quo, and you’ll be surprised at the font of creative gold you will find.

What lessons have you learnt from this challenge or any other challenge that you’ve participated in?