I have spoken quite a bit about the goals that I want to achieve in the next year or two. This is something that I have been sending some of my free time working on. However, my list of goals are rather long and time has the ability to get away from me – especially when I get caught up in video games. With the bad health that I’ve been experiencing over the past few years too, I feel like I’m long overdue on a bit of self-care. What better way to start tackling my 30 before 30 list than with a bit of stationery self-care? And with InCoWriMo around the corner, what better time than now?
To help me motivate myself and keep me on track, I have decided to have a ‘focus’ for each month. This would be a theme that I focus on. January’s was very much ‘settling back in’ to reality, blogging and work. It has been a month of regaining focus on my goals and motivating myself for the coming year with a little bit of planning. Today, I thought I’d share February’s theme in the hopes that perhaps someone else will join me on this challenge. Together, we can stay a little more motivated to stick to it, after all.
February’s Challenge
Now with February around the corner, it seemed like a perfect theme for the month was an upcoming challenge – InCoWriMo. Also known as International Correspondence Writing Month, the challenge is pretty much what the name suggest – writing to people. This works perfectly with my challenge of handwriting more letters or cards! The challenge itself encourages people to write a piece of correspondence – a letter, a card, a postcard or even just a note – every day for the whole of the month.
One of the things I love most about writing letters to people is the response I get from it. From my experience, it makes people smile and, even if it’s just for a moment, it makes them happy. It’s a pleasant surprise in this day and age of technology.
The challenge might have stopped last year as I haven’t seen any activity in a while. Hopefully I’m wrong and they are still very much running. Turns out that I was wrong and they just moved to a new website suddenly! So I’m thrilled to say that they are still alive and running. Nonetheless, the idea of the month is still something that I really like and I wanted to give a mention to them as I’ve been inspired to dedicate the month of February to trying to write more letters because of them. The idea itself works perfectly and it’s a great way to encourage more writing, which I really like.
Want to Write?
Feeling inspired by the concept, I want to extend this challenge to all of you reading this now. Why don’t you try to hand-write a message to someone this month? If it’s something you already do, then perhaps aim to write a bit more. If it’s something you never do, even one would be great! This could be any piece of correspondence you like.
Writing Challenges you could do:
- A correspondence every day [28 by the end of the month]
- Two or Three correspondences a week [8 to 12 by the end]
- One correspondence a week [4 by the end]
- Once in the whole month [1 by the end]
- Write X letters to strangers
- Write X letters to your loved ones
- Come up with your own!
If you are feeling up for the challenge of doing a piece of correspondence every day for the whole month then be sure to check out InCoWriMo’s new website to find out more about their campaign.
My personal challenge will be to try and write two pieces of correspondence a week, at least half of which contain some sort of handmade element within them. By ‘handmade element’, this could be anything from a quick sketch to a designed by me card.
If you’re feeling inspired to give it a go, please do let me know! I’d love to hear from you and see what challenge you set yourself for the month. Leave a comment below, drop me a message on social media or email me and let me know what your challenge is!
Find out more about InCoWriMo at their website here – and fingers crossed that they return! Huh, wow, fingers crossed worked! InCoWriMo 2019 is back over on a new website, which you can find here: https://incowrimo-2019.org/.
P.S. If you’re interested in any of the products that I featured in the photos I used in this post, be sure to follow my Instagram. These are likely ones I’ll be using over the month and will feature in more depth! (Or drop me a message and ask for details!)
I spoke about a few challenges that are occurring April recently. One of them is #The100DayProject. I wanted to talk about it in a bit more depth and share some ideas that I have had for this project with you. The 100 Day Project is an opportunity to be more creative. It challenges you to pick up any creative projects that you want to do and dedicate the next one hundred days to it. 