Before the end of 2023, I was thinking about a fun challenge to push myself to do my habits in a more efficient way. Hence, the idea of challenging myself to do something for 365 days came into existence, and I came up with 3 challenges that I planned to do every day for the year 2024.
These challenges were: meditation, doing yoga, and completing 5 pomodoros per day.
Back in 2023, I practiced meditation and yoga, but I noticed that I wasn’t sticking to them as consistently as I should have. Including them in the challenge was a way to commit to these two habits more effectively.
As for the pomodoro part, I realised that in 2023, I didn’t complete as many pomodoros as I intended. So, I decided to aim for a minimum of 5 pomodoros per day as my target for the rest of the year.
Now, let’s jump into the results of each challenge, starting with meditation.
Meditation challenge
To tell you directly, I didn’t have a perfect 365-day challenge. However, before sharing how many days I meditated in 2024, let’s compare each month from both 2023 and 2024 to show you my performance in meditation.
Total meditation sessions in 2023 = 164 times (44.9%)
Total meditation sessions in 2024 = 305 times (83.3%)
Let’s start with the year 2023.
The beginning of the new year was relatively strong, with 21 meditation sessions.
From February to August, the number of meditation sessions dropped significantly, ranging from 4 to 10 per month. This made me realise that I barely had any motivation or strong ties to meditation, which led me to consider a new solution.
This solution involved turning my meditation practice into a learning project, which I called The Stillness Finder. This learning project was based on a method developed by Culadasa and supplemented with other books and audio talks, serving as the theoretical part of the project. This fresh start in meditation positively impacted my performance, resulting in between 23 and 27 meditation sessions per month.
Speaking about the following year, 2024, thanks to the 365-day challenge, there was a significant increase in how many days I meditated. It was something I was proud of because meditating consistently had always been challenging for me, and sometimes it felt like a chore.
However, due to this challenge, I had to keep pushing myself. From the charts, you can see that I maintained a score of more than 27 sessions per month from January to September, which was refreshing and motivating.
Not only that, but I also managed to achieve four perfect months, something I couldn’t even accomplish, not even having one perfect month in 2023.
The last three months of 2024 didn’t go as I had hoped. The decline in performance was apparent and was primarily due to a lack of preparation for my day and failing to block time specifically for meditation.
The Yoga Challenge
When it comes to Yoga, let’s see how much of a difference this 365-day challenge worked out for me.
As you can see clearly, the better year was 2024.
In 2023, I only practised yoga 108 times. Compared to 2024, the results were far beyond those of 2023. I managed to do yoga 254 times, which is a 235% increase.
The 365-day yoga challenge significantly boosted my performance, especially in the first three months, where I achieved near-perfect results (missing just one day). Those three months alone accounted for almost 83.8% of my total yoga sessions in 2023.
As time went on, however, I lost interest in the challenge. I stopped posting updates on social media, and laziness, among other reasons, crept in, steadily reducing my performance. This decline culminated in my worst results during the last three months of 2024, where I practised yoga just 6, 6, and 5 times, respectively.
One thing worth noting about 2023 is that during September, I scored 23 yoga sessions, my highest score for that year. This improvement came from switching my focus from simply doing yoga workouts to approaching it as a learning project. This roadmap combined theoretical learning about yoga with the physical workouts.
5 Pomodoros per day challenge
Speaking of the third challenge, let’s see both of my performance of the year 2023 and 2024.
in 2023, I completed 697 pomodoros, that is the average of 1.9 Pomodoros per day.
In 2024, the results were much better, with the total nearly tripling to 1,678 Pomodoros.
Looking at the charts, we see that in 2023, there were only three months during which I completed more than 100 Pomodoros: April, September, and December.
April was more of a transitional month into the second trimester of the year, which motivated me to put more effort into tasks, resulting in an increase in completed Pomodoros. September is my birth month, so it makes sense that I doubled my efforts, reminding myself that the older I get, the more energy and time I should dedicate to my work.
As for December, it marked the end of the year, a period when I usually double down on my reading to complete my reading challenges, leading to more Pomodoro sessions.
Moving to 2024, if we divide 1,678 by 366, we get an average of 4.58 Pomodoros per day. This is only the overall average it doesn’t say how many day I managed to do 5 pomodoros per day. If we look at how many days I did at least 5 Pomodoros, the results are as follows:
I had 218 days where I completed 5 or more Pomodoros, giving me a 60% success rate. This falls short of my target goal of 99.7% (365 days out of 366 days).
This means there were 148 days where I did fewer than 5 Pomodoros.
Closing up
You can clearly see from the charts and the results I got that I started so strong the challenges in the first couple of months, a trend that is similar with all the three challenges which tends to get weakened as times passed, and it gives the worst results by the end of the year.
The goal of doing 365 days were almost perfect which set me up to fail reaching them.
Perhaps if I had one challenge my results would be much better? But then again, on the positive note, the final results of all the 3 challenges are much better compared to the year 2023
When it comes to 365-day challenges of 2025, things will have some changes in the format and goals, which you will hear about pretty soon.
I wonder if you had any challenges in 2024, yourself? how did it got? did you accomplish your goals? Let me know in the comments!
