WRITING

100 Articles in 100 Days: Full Review of My Challenge + Moving to Poland

I’ve written more than 100.000 words in 100 days!

Finally, I’ve done it. This is the 100th article of my 100 days of writing challenge. Which means I’ve crossed the finish line. Right on time!

A warm thank you to Dr Mehmet Yildiz, creator of the ILLUMINATION publication, who gave me the idea for this challenge and supported me along the way.

Now, let’s review the results, the lessons, and what comes next…

The traffic results

My challenge has started on 1st Feb, and here is the progression of my stats:

As you can see, the results vary a lot. When you score a viral article, you get a big traffic spike. That’s what happened with article number 35: Focus Hack: Plunging Into Your Work, which was the most viral to date.

When you don’t have virality, the articles get much fewer views. Sometimes, there’s a delay. An article goes unnoticed, with just 10 or 20 views. And then suddenly, it catches fire. That’s what happened to my article Unstoppable Writing article.

There’s definitely a part of luck here, but some factors clearly accelerate the visibility of your articles, such as:

Writing catchy titles, as I did with my Becoming Batman article.
Writing stories, as I did in my article: The Day I Discovered What It Means to Be Truly Happy
Using metaphors, as I did in my articles Boiling Frog Syndrome and Plunging into your work

Quality pays sometimes, but not always. If you write about something very specific, it won’t attract much audience, unfortunately.

Another factor that helps is to get published in popular publications, such as Better Humans. One thing I noticed is that when you get published in a popular publication, your article will be more likely to get selected for further distribution (that is: displayed on the main pages of Medium).

The audience results

About the audience, here are the results:

In the beginning, I had a lot of new followers, because I was writing comments on new writers’ articles who were asking for followers, so they followed me back.

After this, I didn’t comment so much on other writers' articles and got much less attention. Don’t get me wrong here: I am used to reading articles every day and often comment when I enjoyed an article. But I did't spend enough time on this to create a meaningful difference in my statistics.

Anyway, I believe that people who find me on their own tend to be more likely to become true fans of my content.

The Medium Partnership

In the beginning, I was eager to have 100 followers. That’s because I wanted to apply for the Medium Partnership program. Sadly, Medium rejected me because I’m not in a supported country of the program.

This was not a big deal anyway. My main motivation was not money so I moved on quickly after this. Also, since I’m moving next month to a supported country, I will probably get accepted once I get to my new living place.

The tools I used

Here’s the list of tools I used along this challenge:

Headline Studio to write compelling titles
801+ Power Words to find powerful emotional words
Capitalize my title to format my titles
Wikimedia Commons & Unsplash for pictures
Grammarly to fix my grammar errors

At some point, I tried an AI editor: WordHero. But after some time, I stopped using it. I’m not against using AI to improve articles. It can truly help to create more compelling sentences. But it was too cumbersome for me to separate the good from the bad results I got from the tool.

To edit my articles, I used the LogSeq application at the beginning, then I switched to Obsidian, which is a more stable editor.

Obsidian is not only an editor, it’s also a personal knowledge management system. I’ve written about it here: Building Your Personal Encyclopedia

Also, I’ve covered how I organize my articles in Obsidian in this article: From 1 to 93 Articles: Here’s How I Mass-Produce My Articles

My backlog of unpublished articles

When I started this 100 days of writing challenge, I was thinking about publishing each article I write right away.

Then I figured out it was not worth publishing on Saturday and Sunday.

This means that, although I’ve written every article of this 100 days challenge, I’ve still not published all my articles yet.

Here’s what my publishing backlog looks like:

Friday Evening Hangover — How to Get Productive When You Don’t Feel Like It?
Break Free From Procrastination by Washing Your Hands
Overcoming a Creativity Block With the Malkovich Principle
Deep Insights: 7 Books That Caused a Mini-Revolution in My Life
Avoiding Disastrous Personal Crises with a Risk Register
Solitude + Goal = Big Magic
Breakthrough Pauses: Yes, There is a Recipe to Produce Genius Ideas
Burning the ships … or not!
Unshakable Weekly Reviews: power-up your workweek with a touch of social interaction
The Crash Test Principle: How to Be on Time Every Time
20 good reasons to get organized
3 books on participative leadership that will blow your mind
Why do I get told what to do while everybody else goofs off?
The joy of flow: turning your unpleasant task into a mouth-watering strawberry cocktail
Smart conditioning: how to prime your success with a fetish object
Personal development bootcamps: how to turbocharge your learning with an intensive challenge
4 delightful ways to get to know your teammates as a remote worker
The art of listening:12 ways to really be present, when it matters most

I will now publish the rest of these articles, but at a slower pace. I plan to publish one article per week from this backlog, starting from next week.

Upcoming newsletter + free guide

One reason I’m slowing down my publication pace is that I have to catch up on a lot of things I had to postpone because of my workload.

First, my personal blog is still a mess. I need to work on the design of the home page, which is blank right now. And I have to republish most of my Medium articles on my blog (with a canonical link on Medium to indicate to Google the original article is on my blog).

I’m also working on a free guide. I already told you about it in a previous check-in. The working title is “Unshakable Productivity”. And it will contain my favorite 7 productivity techniques to be productive in the long term while avoiding burnout.

I will also start a newsletter in order to start my productivity community.

I’m moving to Poland

As you might know, I’m French, but I’m living right now in Mauritius. I’ve lived here since 2008. This island is a real gem but it’s now time for me to move somewhere else.

As I work remotely as a software engineer, I can choose virtually any place to work. This time, I’m moving to Poland.

Why Poland? Well, I need to discover this country because a big chunk of my family is coming from there.

It’s also a place that is relatively cheap, so I’ll be able to have a better buying power than if I was living in my own country. That’s what Tim Ferris calls: using geographical contrasts.

I plan to move to Warsaw, and I have some friends there, so it will be great to join them.

100 days to learn Polish

Last but not least, I’m starting a new 100 days challenge to learn Polish. That means I plan to work one hour per day minimum on my Polish for 100 days.

Polish is a very hard language to learn. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) classifies it as a Category 4 language. It means an English speaker will take about 1100 hours to master it. This is the same category as Russian or Hindi.

So 100 days will be a bit short to get fluent in Polish. However, my goal will be to be able to do a 15-minutes conversation with a native speaker.

Right now, I’m a complete beginner in Polish. Here are the very first words I learned today:

In order to stay accountable, I will do regular check-in articles on this challenge here on Medium.

This will be exciting!

Conclusion

Finally, after writing 100 articles in 100 days, this is the finish line. In total, I’ve written more than 100,000 words. Writing consistently has been challenging but it was worth it.

In general, when you test your limits, it’s when you learn the most. And I had my share of discoveries. I have learned the intricacies of the Medium platform, I have found better ways to write, and I progressed a lot on my quest for sustainable productivity techniques.

In the next few months, I will slow down the pace of my publications. There will be one productivity article from my backlog and one check-in article on my Polish learning challenge per week.

Also, I will continue to write productivity articles to keep a minimum of articles in reserve. This is important. When you write, it’s better to take your time to refine your ideas instead of feeling stressed out because you don’t have anything left to publish.

Last but not least, stay tuned as I tweak my personal blog, finish my “Unshakable Productivity” free guide and create my productivity community with the creation of the newsletter.