75 Hard for Authors / 185 Insane...

Because writing while working a mentally draining full time job wasn't already hard enough, I said: let's make it even more challenging!

If you’re like me and are always poking around in the goal setting / motivation building corners of the internet, you’re probably familiar with 75 Hard. It’s basically a tough, no-nonsense method of establishing good habits and improving your life in concrete ways. The original 75 Hard is as follows:

All of which are indisputably great habits to develop. But, there have been a handful of AuthorTube people that have taken this ideology and come up with their own set of rules and created 75 Hard for Authors. Katesbookdate and Dr. Daley Knows #KidLit both took the setup of the original challenge and established goals for writing that were relatively aligned to them (For Katesbookdate: 2k words, 45 minutes of movement, 10 minutes of reading, 8 posts on social media, meditate, and document; for Dr. Daley: two 45 minute sprints, treats, reading 10 pages, drinking tea, and recording the daily word count), which I kind of liked—it keeps the initial spirit of the challenge alive, while making it more writerly-focused.

But then I saw something that really tickled both my overachiever and goal-motivated parts of my brain: Author Jenna Streety decided to do a full six months and dubbed the challenge 185 Insane. Her rules—as the name of the challenge probably implies—are quite a bit more intense, and numerous, than the 75 Hard rules, (1k more words per day than your usual goal, completely draft 3 books / 500k, self-publish 2 books OR 3 novellas, do one author event, post 3 pieces of content per day, make new author friends, 5k steps, 5+ bottles of water, stick to a routine for exercise / diet, join 24-hour novel, no social media between 9pm-9am, 30 minutes of reading, stick to sleep schedule and night routine, find a new hobby and DON’T monetize it) but something unique to this particular brand of the challenge is that it also encourages off days, scheduled breaks, and honoring rest.

I am a person who thrives off of routines and keeping busy, which can be a bit of a nightmare with my job, since it abruptly stops for two and a half months every summer, leaving me with unlimited time to myself. And while that theoretically means I have plenty of time and opportunity to get things done, without structure or routine, I often end up accomplishing less when I’m not working 8-10 hours a day. So I—naturally—decided that I wanted to try something like 75 Hard for Authors in Q3 and Q4 this year to see if I could finally establish a routine that was both solid enough, and flexible enough, to work for both summer / breaks and when school is in session. Which meant I needed to come up with a list of “rules” for myself to follow for this six month period that was challenging enough to keep me focused during off-time, but still flexible enough that I would be able to stick to it during the school year.

Thus, my personal 185 Insane Challenge Rules:

As things go, as I was finalizing my list and really feeling motivated about how awesome it is going to be at the end of this next chunk of 6 months to see how much I get done by following this ruleset, Lindsay Pucket posted her video about participating in the challenge (which included a whole slough of other AuthorTubers who would be joining in as well), shared her rules, and created a cozy little place on her Discord for participants within her community to take place. As with all good content, I borrowed some aspects from Lindsay’s challenge as well. She opted for more of a 75 “Medium” approach, adding in percentages of the time, or a traditional work-week. And those are some of the approaches that I am adopting within my personal “caveats.”

So, let’s break down these caveats, shall we? If I’m running them alone, 2 hours of writing sprints is, for me, 4-20 minute blocks of dedicated, uninterrupted writing. I plan on doing one hour as part of my morning routine (from 6a-7a), and then I’d like to do the second hour as part of a coworking stream within the Hearties Community, since they do sprints pretty much daily. If I don’t manage to make one of those sessions, however, I will complete the second hour in the evening on my own instead. Within the writing goal, however, I have the sub-goal / intention to fully draft and edit two novels. One I have already started and am approximately one-third of the way through the first draft, the other I haven’t even fully decided what it will be yet. But, by the end of the year, two fully written and edited novels, ready for publication. After I’ve established this routine, I also want to complete at least one writing session a week outside of my own apartment.

For my daily progress tracking, this is going to take place on TrackBear for the super granular day-by-day details, but then it will be shared here monthly, in my monthly wrap-up posts, as an overview. Something else I was considering doing was a little sort of “day in the life” vlog-style video, with daily clips that are then edited together for the full month, and putting that up here as a paid perk. I’m still on the fence about that one, but it’s something I’m going to at least give a solid try to do. So if you want to see more of my face, consider going paid here on Substack.

The social media posts can be anything that is somehow tangentially related to the things I’m doing as a part of this challenge, really: writing, game dev, editing, etc. It will include my weekly Substack emails, any of the notes I actually write here (or repost, but only if I add a caption to the repost, not just sharing someone else’s work), streaming on Twitch, or whatever. It cannot simply be whatever random thought I happen to toss up on Bluesky on a random Tuesday afternoon.

The learning goal might feel a bit ambiguous, but it’s not really; I just didn’t have a better short-form way to phrase: “omg, erin, you have paid for so many classes and have a subscription to Masterclass and you never. actually. watch. anything!” that made sense. So, every day, I want to be consuming some form of content to help improve my brain. It doesn’t have to be from any specific course or format, but this is my version of reading nonfiction from the original 75 Hard Challenge.

The health-related things seem pretty self-explanatory to me. The reason there’s not a number with the calorie goal is because I imagine it will fluctuate over the course of six months and I don’t want to “fail” what was previously on-track. Similarly, the intentional movement isn’t specific because right now that might be swimming, but come December, I might need to be doing yoga indoors, or maybe the apartment complex randomly shuts down the pool for months. Or maybe I get an annual pass to Disney and start walking laps around Echo Lake, or I take up bowling. Needless to say, there’s a lot of flexibility left there to make sure that I can make that particular goal work into whatever schedule, weather, or personal interest whims I might have.

I won’t lie; I also have two “soft” goals that aren’t listed here officially, but I will be attempting to include as well: 30 minutes of gaming per day (in an effort to play through some of the nearly 300 games I own, but have never played…), and working on game development in some form or fashion daily, ideally streaming 2x+ per week while doing so. These two “goals” are hobbies through-and-through, however, so I opted not to include them because they’re the things that if I don’t feel like doing them, I won’t, and that will just be okay. I had them both on the list originally, but it just didn’t feel right to include them, so I didn’t. Will I reassess at the halfway point and end up adding them on? Maybe. But for now, they’re the ambitious, unspoken, pieces of this challenge for me.

And then, finally, the thing that I’ve had the hardest time grappling with in making any decisions — the idea of not restarting the challenge if you miss a day, giving myself opportunities for rest… All of those things that are logical and about being kind to yourself, but make me feel “less than” and not perfect and trigger my brain to then be like, “well, why bother at all??” Which is so. not. the. point. And expecting myself to be spot-on with this many goals for six months straight? Literally the definition of setting myself up for failure. So, how then did I decide to incorporate that concept of giving myself grace into my goals? I’m jumping back to Lindsay for the inspiration on that one and shooting for 90% of my days being 90% complete. While she is approaching some of her goals with a “work week” idea, I opted not to take that direction, since I want this to be something that works alongside work and I think it will be easier to maintain consistency if I have my two day job off days mixed in with the days that I am working. It will also be a good litmus test for the longevity of this sort of life restructuring. But the idea that maybe one morning I sleep in and have to skip one part of my morning routine so I can log in on time for work restarting my whole challenge and being a “failure?” that’s not cool. With the 90/90 rule, that means I can miss ONE task on up to 19 days during the 185 days the challenge is happening. With that, it still is strict enough to put pressure on me to get things done and not slack because there’s “nothing stopping me,” but it’s not so much that I’m expecting absolute perfection.

The one caveat that I will be upholding to that, however, is if there is a day I am legitimately ill, in whatever sense of the word that may be? It doesn’t count. I’ll get whatever pieces of the list I feel up to completing done, but otherwise? That day just doesn’t exist.

And, the big question — when does this insanity begin? Well, that’s actually why this post is coming this week, rather than the WriterMBA / HeartieCon post that I had mentioned last week. That post is still coming! It’ll just be next Monday instead. Because I wanted to start this challenge on the 22nd with Lindsay’s community, I decided to put this post out this week, so it’s out there for everyone to see, and maybe join in with us, before everything is officially kicking off. This week, I’m soft-launching my morning and night routines to make sure they’re sustainable for the long term and not something that makes me likely to give up on them, and making any sort of fine-tuning that needs to happen, but officially, 185 Insane for Authors (for me) kicks off on 22 June.

I’m excited to see how much I get done, committing to this sort of challenge, especially for 6 entire months (part of which, I’ll be on a cruise ship on vacation for in November), and I hope you all are excited to follow along on the journey!

Would you ever commit to a challenge like this — in any of the 75 Soft / Medium / Hard / 185 Insane varieties? Tell me what some of your goals are for the next three-to-six months in the comments!