A to Z Challenge & Changing Blogging Habits

Less than a month to go until the A to Z Challenge now. I'm quite looking forward to it (though so far I've managed to get a grand total of one post actually written for it, and it's not even the first post... which is logical).

When I signed up for it I thought that it would be a useful way to get into the habit of posting something on my blog everyday. I've always wanted to post more frequently and I thought that even if when I got to the end of April I stopped posting every day, perhaps I'd be able to get into a good routine with my posting. I mean, I don't exactly do enough interesting stuff to make it worthwhile to post every day, do I?

Then I sat down with my phone and made up a little calendar to try and plan some blog posts. After completely cocking up what day of the month April started with I started over and quickly started planning posts for the A to Z Challenge. I enjoyed it so much that I started doing it for the remaining days of February, then ran out of days and made a start on March as well, and suddenly I had a blog post planned for each day of the month.

It was kind of scary how quickly that happened. Especially as after I planned something for each day, stuff actually happened in my life (little things like getting a hair cut or finishing a knitting project or mastering a technique with my camera) and suddenly I was having to rearrange things to make room for another post.

I don't think I have the most interesting life in the world. I read, I watch TV and films, I take my dog for walks, I knit and I study, but some how I keep on finding things to say online. I was expecting the A to Z Challenge to push me to come up with something interesting to say every day (and I was relieved that I had a month and a half to come up with it), but it's actually worked earlier than I was expecting.

Originally I was planning on taking a break from the things I normally blog about during the Challenge, but things started creeping in. I thought 'I can't take a break from my book reviews, I've been slow reading this year, but I don't want to fall behind and have to spend a whole week at the end of the year posting book reviews like I did last time'; so the book reviews started to be slotted in to the time table. Then I thought 'I've been enjoying doing my little reviews of how I'm getting on with my Day Zero targets, I don't really want to stop doing those'; I've gotten into a routine of posting them every Thursday so it made sense to just carry on scheduling them through the month too. Sundays are a 'day off' from the Challenge, so I'd always been planning on posting my Project 52 posts through the month anyway.

Can you see where this is going?

I justified it by telling myself that there will probably be people who read my blog but aren't interesting in the Infertility/Trying to Conceive posts that I'm planning, so it makes sense to carry on posting regular posts through the month. I'm sure I read somewhere on the A to Z Challenge site that you should try to carry on with normal posting during the month so that's why I'm trying to do.

I won't feel too guilty if I miss a day here or there, but in theory it shouldn't happen. Hopefully I won't annoy people by bombarding my blog with posts. I've not had any complaints about the recent increase in posts, in fact, since getting involved with the A to Z Challenge my traffic has positively increased, which has been nice.

It's made me a bit curious. For those of you who've done the Challenge before, did it change your approach to blogging? And for those who're doing it for the first time, have you noticed a change in the run up?