Awesome Challenges for 2012

2012 is just a day away! Here are some great year-long Challenges that will keep you on track!

• 101in365 - add 101 goals you want to achieve in 2012!
• 365 Pages of Life - write a page about your day everyday for a year.
• A Year of Meatless Mondays - cut meat out of your diet every Monday this year.
• Smoke-Free 365 - kick your smoking habit once and for all!
• Project Literacy 52 - read a book a week for the whole year.
• Post a YouTube Video Every Week For A Year - just what the title says!
• Photo 365 - take a photo every day for 365 days.
• 2012 laps for 2012 - in honor of the London 2012 Olympics, run or walk around a track 2012 times this year!

Can’t find a Challenge you like? Create one yourself!

A New Round of Challenges

As an experimental part of the site, Challenges have been through a lot of changes over the last month. They’ve had rules added and removed, they’ve crashed, they’ve gotten stuck. Overall, they’ve had a rough life so far.

But, despite all of that, so many of you have made such fantastic progress on your Challenges. Some of the comment threads are super active and so many tips are being exchanged among the the players. It’s been so cool to watch, and I’ve done my best to keep them up and running despite being duct taped together as an experiment.

One month in, it’s quite clear what works and what doesn’t. I’ve gone into hiding these last few days to sit down and (hopefully) solve the issues with the Challenges system once and for all. And I’m happy (and relieved!) to say that I just pushed those fixes live!

Here’s what’s new with Challenges:

• The idea of “rounds” has been organized a lot more. Rounds still have the requirement of 3 or more players, but instead of being rolling or beginning when the previous round has ended, Rounds now begin each Monday. On Monday the system will check for any Round that has 3 or more players and will kick it off. This means no more waiting months (or even a YEAR!) before you can participate in a Challenge!
• Each Challenge now has a Challenge page and a Round page. The Challenge page highlights all of the important info about the Challenge and helps you get to your Round page. Your Round page is where you get to update your progress and chat with your team. Consider it your home within the Challenge.
• The Wall of Fame (pending a much better name) is new! Each Challenge page has a Wall of Fame that spotlights all of the members who’ve completed that Challenge. All the cool kids want to be on the Wall of Fame.
• Coming soon: A more organized commenting system.

There are a lot of other crazy bits behind the scenes to power this seemingly simple update, but I’m pretty confident the new system will hold up in a much more graceful fashion from here on out!

So go on and check out the new Challenges! What do you think of the new system?

Challenges are open for all!

Good news! That rule that you couldn’t join a Challenge that had already begun? GONE.

Waiting 1-3 months to take on a Challenge was a bit ridiculous. So now you can join any Challenge, even if it’s already begun! You’ll have to do some catching up though - Challengers are pretty serious about their game!

Check out the Challenges and join one now! 

Challenge Yourself

Over the last few weeks I’ve been running a behind-the-scenes preview of a new twist on the old Groups section that makes working on goals into more of a social endeavor - basically a group game that lets people come together to work on a single goal.

Today I’m happy to say that the gates are open and Accomplsh Challenges are alive for everyone to join!

Here’s how it works:

• Log in (or sign up!) and head over to accompl.sh/challenges. There you’ll see a list of all of the Challenges that are currently available to join - they range from fitness goals to cooking goals to blogging goals and more.
• When you find a Challenge you like: join it! You can join up to 3 Challenges at a time.
• If you don’t like any of the Challenges listed, create one yourself!
• Every Sunday, any Challenge that has more than 5 players signed up will be activated and from there on you’ll be able to track your progress and work together to complete your goal!

Once a Challenge has started, the round is closed off and no new players will be able to join that round. You can easily put yourself on the waiting list for the next round by clicking the “Join next round” button.

That’s it! Staying motivated to complete a goal has never been easier!

Thanks to everyone who helped preview / debug Challenges! If you’d like to be invited to preview a future feature, be sure to follow Accomplsh on Twitter or Facebook!

Now go Challenge Yourself!