KISS, or Keep it Super Simple, is a fun acronym I learned from my cringe-worthy days MLM'ing. The concept is that if it's hard you won't follow through, you won't be consistent and without consistency, you won't win that white Lexus.
I also counsel this way with my nutrition clients. When we're adding in meal planning or gentle movement, I work with my clients to make sure it is so simple it feels dumb to skip it.
That's the problem with these 30/21/7 day challenges. Whether it's wellness or cleaning or organizing or content creating, the challenges push us out of what is easy. And at first, that adrenaline and excitement of doing the thing gets us through, but then inevitably life catches up, because yeah it does that, every day. And then those '3 easy steps' feel like the hardest things you have to do and you don't even want to look at it ever again. *that's me and batch content creating - puke*
Doing something, even for 30 days, is not enough consistency to keep it up forever or to make the lasting changes you want, in whatever area you are working towards, generally speaking, I'm sure someone has an exception to this rule.
Unless you are working towards a goal that has an exact end point, writing a book, hell just reading a book, cleaning out the garage, or painting your house, then you need to find the small steps that feel so easy you could do them FOREVER.
Do you want a consistently organized and clean house? Sure there might be the initial or periodical deep clean, but then it's the systems that you do each and every day and week that will help you maintain that. Maybe just start with vacuuming for 10 minutes a day. It doesn't matter where or what, but for 10 minutes vacuuming doesn't feel hard and technically there are fewer crumbs on the floor when it's done. Just do that for a month. Then maybe add, ok 5 minutes after dinner we do a family pick-up shit time, where everyone in the house has to choose a flat surface to clear off and put away (I am a part of a family of stackers so this hits hard).
Whatever the thing is, it has to be so easy you might even kind of doubt it's helping. You doubt it because it doesn't feel hard, and we are taught that anything hard is good and is productive and has real results. But it's the worms underneath the soil just wiggling around a little bit each day that are making your garden healthy. It's the small movements we do that make up the majority of our lives, the things we'll remember.
The added bonus is that when one thing feels really easy, and you've done it for a while you will feel one of two things. Either that one really easy thing will feel like enough, it will fit in your day, you feel satisfied with it, and there it shall stand. That 10 minutes of vacuuming most days, makes you feel really great because you aren't spending all of Saturday morning rushing around and being grumpy that you have to clean because the dust bunnies are on the attack. Satisfied, content, yay! Or you'll feel like, 'Oh wow that was easy, I have been doing that 10 minutes of vacuuming most days, adding something easy is great, I love that, I love how I feel doing that, what is the next really really really easy thing I can do?' And then you add that, and now you're just adding super simple things all around until a year goes by and you don't even recognize the person that was so stressed out about that thing before.
But don't worry, since life is always happening there will be sure to be new challenges and OPPORTUNITIES (don't you hate that) to flex this super simple strategy again.
