What Happens When You Write 30 Articles in 30 Days

4 min readNov 4, 2020

This piece reflects one non-technical founder’s self-imposed writing challenge and the grit required to finish 500+ words per day for thirty consecutive days. Here’s how a single daunting mission became a sequence of 90-plus minute creative exercises.

The process of organizing thoughts and bringing them to life in the public domain went like this. An idea in bundleIQ became a Grammarly draft, and that draft transformed into a post on Medium. Each had its respective strengths — bundleIQ for notes, Grammarly for writing, and Medium for blogging.

When I set out on this journey, I didn’t think much of it, other than this would not be easy. After a few days of posting, moral support came from friends as messages started showing up in my inbox. The expectation to post once a day had me reeling with discomfort after day four. But if I’m honest it didn’t get any easier until after day fourteen.

“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”― Neil Gaiman.

After working all day, the last thing I wanted to do was write an article about anything. But I found that when I sat down to express my ideas, my mind would shift into deep thought and start making progress with great determination. Nothing more than a commitment to post before midnight motivated me to show up to this challenge.

The plan never had a design. Someone asked, how did you strategize your posts? Truth be told, I didn’t. What stands out to me now is that there was a method to my madness.

Commit to the Mission

The mission here was simple, publish thirty articles in thirty days. Even if the purpose wasn’t apparent in the beginning, I can say with clarity now, the goal was to push myself into a meditative state surrounding bundleIQ, and it worked. The content created over this period is formative. I dug deeper into the psyche of our user as well as our use cases.

Design the Environment

Imagine sitting for two hours, not being able to get up or move other than shifting your weight from one position to another. Now, sink into how you feel after work and consider the mood you embody during this time. Setting the writing scene was essential. The most comfortable and productive writing position was upright with a pillow behind my back, a pillow on my lap, and the computer on top.

Get Creative

Being inventive when you wanted to shut down was tough, but I hacked my way through it. Exercise, brain foods, herbal tea, chill music, limited distractions, and comfort were crucial to performance. Instrumental and deep focus (not meditative) playlists were on repeat. And as far as rules, write without editing until I got to a point where the story was starting to show itself, and I could go back to connect the dots more meaningfully.

The Climax

These past thirty days have been quite the odyssey. Not only did I test my ability to meet my expectations, but my teams. This past month has been incredibly stressful at work. We have been struggling through the challenge of getting our AI to function the way it should in production.

And as fate would have it upon finishing this last sentence, a notification comes through, “Things are working!”