30-day challenge ideas: 60 small challenges you can start tomorrow

How to choose a 30-day challenge

Choose one challenge that fits into a day you’ve already got. Then shrink day 1 until it’s almost silly.

Three questions help you pick:

1. What do you keep saying you’ll do? Maybe it’s the guitar in the corner.
2. When would it happen? Tie it to something daily, like plugging in your phone.
3. What’s the busy-day version? If it won’t fit your worst Tuesday, it’s too big.

That last question decides the size.

The point of a challenge is showing up on day 2, and on day 17, and on all the forgettable days between them that nobody photographs or posts about.

If day 1 takes more than five minutes, shrink it.

It’s the same idea behind small goals in general. A tiny start is easy to repeat, and repeating is the whole point.

Stacking challenges is the classic mistake. Each one looks small on the 1st, when the month is fresh and the calendar has nothing written on it yet.

But on a hard evening, small things add up to one big thing you skip.

For what keeps you going in week two, read how to stay consistent.

10 challenges with a day-1 and day-30 size

Here are ten good 30-day challenges, each with a start and a finish size.

The last column names the matching ready goal in our app, for anyone who’d rather skip drawing a grid by hand.

Look at the day-1 column. Day 1 is a rehearsal, and nobody hands out medals at rehearsals.

And the day-30 size is a ceiling you can stop below. If week three feels right at 6 pages, then 6 pages is the challenge.

Every ready goal in Yumemira has a smaller busy-day step that counts in full.

On paper, write your busy-day size in the corner of the calendar before day 1.

60 30-day challenge ideas, sorted by area of life

Below is a 30-day challenge list in five groups of 12 ideas. Each idea gives the day-1 size first, then where it could be by day 30.

Skim until one makes you think “I could do that tonight”. That’s usually the right one.

But the body list is about actions you can count. What they do for your body is a question for your doctor, who knows it better than any list.

That’s the first 24. If nothing has grabbed you yet, the next groups lean toward learning and money, then home.

Number 30 comes from a real 30-day challenge, told further down, and it may be the easiest one here to start tonight, since the camera is already in your pocket.

One tap a day.

So the money group is about habits with money. A $1 day is as real as a $10 day.

The last group works well as a household challenge. Stick it on the fridge and let everyone cross off their own day.

Want more starting points beyond 30 days? There are a hundred examples of goals, each with a first step for today.

How to grow a challenge from day 1 to day 30

Grow the size once a week, never every day. Four small bumps are easier to remember than thirty.

Here’s what that looks like for a reading challenge, with the kind of line you might write at the end of each week.

If a week felt hard, don’t grow it. Repeat the same size for another week.

The calendar won’t mind.

In the app, a goal can do the growing for you. Turn on Start small and grow in goal setup, and the first days start easier, with a little more as you go.

You can also set a 30-day challenge on a ready goal.

On paper, the plan fits in the margin of a wall calendar. Pencil 2, 4, 6 and 10 next to the first day of each week.

A real 30-day story, one photo at a time

The idea got a big push from a short talk. In 2011, Matt Cutts, then an engineer at Google, gave a TED talk called Try something new for 30 days (opens in a new tab).

In a 2017 interview on NPR’s TED Radio Hour (opens in a new tab), he listed some of his past challenges. They included a compliment for his wife each day and 10 minutes of ukulele.

His suggestion for a first try was small: take one picture a day for 30 days. He said it made each day easier to remember.

Two parts of that interview are worth keeping, especially if you’ve ever planned a whole year of self-improvement on January 1 and abandoned it by the second weekend.

• He’d pick the next challenge near the end of the month, with about a week left, instead of planning the whole year.
• He said a month of meditation didn’t suit him at all. Not every challenge sticks, and he said so.

But that’s one person’s story, in his own words. Yours will go its own way.

A challenge that didn’t stick still taught you something.

Can you build a habit in 30 days?

There’s no fixed number. Thirty days is a calendar length, and it’s handy because every month has a 1st.

One study, led by Phillippa Lally at University College London, followed 96 people as they each tried a new daily behavior.

As James Clear sums it up (opens in a new tab), the time it took to feel automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days. It depended on the person and the habit.

So day 30 is a good checkpoint.

The same summary has a kinder detail. In that study, missing one day didn’t really change the outcome.

After one missed day, do the next day’s step.

What happens on day 31?

On day 31, you get to choose: keep it, grow it, or stop. Each one is a fair ending to a month.

• Keep it if it fits into your day without a fight.
• Grow it if the day-30 size feels easy by now.
• Stop if it never fit. You learned that in 30 days, not 300.

Read back your month before you decide.

And trust the page over your memory, because thirty short lines will tell you more than the one bad Tuesday in week two that your brain keeps replaying.

But some challenges become part of the week. Others end up in a drawer next to the spare guitar strings.

Both are normal.

If you want the app to keep count while you decide, try it in Yumemira. A goal can also run with no end date at all.

Pick next month’s challenge with a week to spare.

Tonight, before the light goes off, write tomorrow’s date and one day-1 size. The box for next month is already on the calendar, and it only needs one small thing in it.