My Habit

Compound effect is an effect which has an influence over time. This can be displayed by committing to doing something every day. My sixth grade Language Arts class had this habit. We would plank from September 13, 2021 to November 23, 2021. We started out doing a plank exercise  for 30 seconds and at the end we planked for 3 minutes. Each week we added 15 seconds to our planking time to make it harder. The compound effect was really visible once we started to plank for two minutes. You would want to stop but you had to push through it. One thing that heavily impacted my progress for planking was forgetting to do it. One day I missed planking and it ended up making the next day way harder. It’s like when you’re building a house out of toy blocks. Every time you plank a day you add a block. In the end of the challenge you should have a house, but if you miss a day your house could have some missing blocks or end up falling down. 

Every week that passed showed me how determined you have to be to plank every day. You have to nail it into your head or write it down so you wont forget to do it. We had a tracker for planking so we could record the days we would plank. If we successfully planked we would color the day in. If we missed the day we would leave it blank. I realized that the more you didn’t want to plank, the later you would do it. This would make you end up with a blank day in your planner.

There was one challenge that I had to overcome. This was remembering to plank. I don’t like to write things down, but writing things down helps me to remember to do things. The first week I did horrible on keeping track of planking. As I went on with planking I got better at writing things down and remembering to do it every day, even on Saturdays and Sundays. I can’t promise my family understood why I was doing a plank challenge for Language Arts. One thing was for sure, I overcame this challenge. 

To ball up all my benefits, my opinions on progress, and feelings of this challenge, this ball would be filled with more knowledge, understanding of compound effects, and having a very good feeling about both my benefits and your  progress. To be honest I am sad that the challenge is over. I felt like I did not reach my maximum potential. My last plank ended up being one minute and thirty seconds. This was a huge let down for me. I knew why I only got to one minute thirty seconds. One very big problem I also had was giving up in the heat of battle. I would be almost finished with the plank and I think I couldn’t go on. I have had times when I pulled through and got a better time, but one challenge I never overcame was giving up too easily.

After the plank challenge we had to choose a new habit. I chose reading. This one might not seem exciting or very hard, but I am hoping after I explain with these reasons you will understand why I chose reading. I don’t read that much outside of school, to be honest I actually like to read, and reading can help so many key things in life so why not read for a habit.