When the ancient Mayans first discovered the sacred number 30 in the 7th Century BCE... Ok, I'll stop right there. I hate to disillusion you, but there's nothing magical about the number 30. So, if 30 is arbitrary, why I have a chosen to build a site that mentions "30" not once, but twice?
It's a nice, round number.
Maybe we just like 3's, or maybe 30 is roughly a month (and sounds a lot better than 28, 29, and 31). Plus, a half-hour is 30 minutes and a half-minute is 30 seconds. I'm not sure who came up with dividing time into 60ths, but we're stuck with it. Not even Europeans use metric time.
It's been done before.
Yes, I admit it: the idea of a 30-day experiment is hardly original. There are 30-day diets, 30-day workout plans, and 30-day programs for all sorts of goals and bad habits. There have even been movies – "Supersize Me" (and Spurlock's later FX show "") is based entirely around a 30-day experiment.
So, obviously the idea has some appeal. In fact, just to show I'm not claiming ownership, here are a couple of posts I think are worth your time:
Thirty days is enough.
If you really put 30 minutes/day for 30 days into something and remove distractions, that's 900 minutes (15 hours) of uninterrupted work. That may not be enough to write a novel, and some tasks are, by definition, lifelong (like eating better), but 900 minutes is enough to know if you're on the right track, and it's enough to make real progress. If you commit for 30 days, you'll learn something, one way or another.
It feels like an accomplishment.
It's easy to do something for a couple of days – we've all experienced that adrenaline rush of a new project, and that productivity high can keep us going for a few days or even a week. Getting through 30 days, though, is just tough enough to feel like it counts. If you can commit that long, you'll feel like you've accomplished something.
Thirty days is achievable.
On the other hand, 30 days isn't so much that it seems overwhelming. Somehow, a month seems manageable, and we can shuffle our lives around for a little while if we need to. As much as I think we all need a little tough love when it comes to productivity, there's nothing to be gained by announcing some grand, life-altering, 5-year-plan, only to bail on it a week later. Sometimes, grand plans are their own form of excuse. Plus, every long-term plan starts with the first 30 days, so why not just get started?