It’s that time of the year where everyone is working to build new habits, or at least break some old ones. It takes some time to build a habit and have it stick, so I propose the 100 Day Challenge for those of you who are up for it.

The 100 Day Challenge comes in all shapes and sizes, and can be used to help you build a habit you’ve been chasing. If you set a reasonable challenge and stick to it, this could be the first steps to getting you where you want to be.

As I mentioned, you want to be reasonable in your challenge. If you’ve never lifted weights before, maybe don’t start with lifting all the weights for 100 days in a row. If your goal isn’t reasonable for you to work with on a daily basis you could set yourself up for frustration and put you in a position that may have you leaving the challenge behind. As an example, when I did my challenge last year, I chose to work non-digitally at least once day for 100 days. This was reasonable because I was already creating on a daily basis, mostly digitally, and I had a lot of supplies available at home that I could use. I didn’t need to buy a lot of expensive supplies to get started.

How you execute your challenge is up to you too. This is meant to be a fun challenge, so if you overwhelm yourself the challenge will feel more like a chore rather than growth. I set myself a minimum of 20 minutes of creating with my hands everyday. Sometimes I would go over, sometimes I would be right on time, but I made sure to stick to the minimum of 20 minutes for it to count.

As I mentioned, this is supposed to be fun, not something you end up dreading doing. Be easy on yourself while you go through this. For example, if I was busy with work, course work, or just overwhelmed on a day, I didn’t pressure myself to do my 20 minutes. I skipped that day. Now I did try and set some boundaries on this, some structure helps me to keep things going. So if I skipped a day I wasn’t going to skip the following day.

If you give this a try, you’ll be amazed with what you see. At the end of my challenge I am not using my art supplies every single day, but I am getting a lot more ideas for them. I started a few projects that will keep me busy for a while still and that are inspiring more pieces like them. It’s not a daily habit, but it has adjusted my creative process and development.

What habit are you looking to build this year?

Whatever you decide to do, I hope that you enjoy this fun idea!