Life has a way of distracting us from our goals. Four years ago when I decided to retire CMS Report, I did so in the hope for opportunity to find a new voice in my online presence. It didn't work out so well. Instead of being more creative in my writings, I spent more time maintaining the nuts and bolts to my websites and publishing other people's articles than I did expressing my own thoughts and ideas. I know for many of you, you find yourself in a similar predicament. Between career, family, and other personal interests we have had too many reasons and made up too many excuses for not writing despite valuing our time spent blogging.

For myself, enough is enough with the excuses. I'm participating in my own 31-Day Blogging Challenge starting December 1, 2021.

At this point you're probably noting that I'm committing to less than three dozen posts and you're saying to yourself, how can Bryan fail this challenge? Well, if you don't think failure is an option for me, you don't know me very well. I've started similar endeavors in the past only to find that I had to scale myself back due to higher priorities calling for my attention. But this time will be different and I will be victorious! How do I know I will succeed in the challenge? I plan on doing a little bit of acceptable cheating by recognizing my true goal here isn't to write a blog post everyday but instead to find a daily outlet for creative expression.

A definition of creative expression is "the ability to use our minds and imaginations to create something that represents ourselves...whether through music, visual art, crafting, writing, photography, drama, or movement". So with this in mind, I plan on publishing a blog post once a day without the constraints of limiting myself to traditional blogging. In other words, while I might write full articles on some days there might be other days where I just microblog content at no more than the length of a tweet. Other days, my posts may come in the form of my photography, a video, a podcasts, or even a doodle sketched on a napkin. The thought here is by diversifying the content type in what I post, I will have the creative freedom I need to remain in the challenge.

So there you have it. Starting December 1st I'm beginning my 31-Day Blogging Challenge. All posts will be published on my personal site (bryanruby.com) but I'll also be cross-posting relevant articles I write on additional sites such as this one here.

If this post has inspired you to take on a similar creative challenge or you're already doing one, please let me know though the comments below or through social media such as Twitter.