Challenge 0: embarking on a new personal campaign

I was inspired by a TED talk a couple of months ago.  It collects a number of motivational ideas but primarily the notion of the 30 day challenge, like the SuperSizeMe guy and related to many other habit creating strategies. The small spin is that he promotes the idea of using this strategy to try something new or something that you've always wanted to do for 30 days, and he used it to do some sometimes impressive things and I can see how this concept has enriched his life and can enrich anyone's.  In and of itself, I found that he did all these things to be inspiring, probably in the upper quadrant of things that I find inspiring.  Actually, it's more meta-inspiring; rather that being inspired to do something, it's a gateway into doing things I'm inspired to do.  That's all well and good, plenty of things I'd like to do, most of them old rather than new, but the sentiment is the same.

However, there was one very interesting point he made that has pushed this self-improvement idea out of the big pile of things I'd like/want/need/should do and into the very exclusive and rarified WILL do queue.  And it's the idea that doing these 30 day challenges can anchor your time, give you something to point to and say "yeh, that month I did this".  E.g. it makes your time and life more memorable.  And that drove it home for me.  I could always point to my schooling years (from elementary through grad school) and chunk them into regions and eras, and I could always tag those times with an accomplishment or sets of events. Since then it seems like the months and years just bleed into each other and pass by.  It fills with me regret and almost despair when that "wow, the year's over already" feeling hits me and I feel like I have nothing or not enough to show for it... or for the previous X years.  But with this idea, I can point to month and say "I did that", and with enough of them I may start to build the inertia to keep doing things, hopefully to enrich my life in some way.

I debated how I would proceed.  I considered changing the 30 days to 28 days (i.e. 4 weeks) for the sole reason that I could always begin on the same day of the week which has some advantages for some things I have in mind.  I eventually decided to just start with the beginning of the month, to keep it in sync with how the world keeps dates.  For a different reason, maybe setting 28 days as a "minimum" is not a bad idea if I would like a few days break between "challenges".  I'll reserve the right to make changes as need be, so long as I keep in the spirit of the program, which is to DO THINGS.

I proposed this idea to a buddy of mine and he jumped on it with zeal, in fact he's doing 2 challenges concurrently, though staggered.  For myself, I think I'll dip my toe in with just 1 and try and keep it simple for starters.  And I think I'll record the results here with some kind of evidence.