Challenge Garden - join us to experiment with a 7-day DIY creative challenge

Next week, join us in the Challenge Garden! 🌱

Starting Monday, we're doing a week-long DIY creative challenge exercise, one of a couple small experiments we're running as we lay the groundwork for the next version of Hyperlink.

The Power of a Challenge

We're fans of the creative challenge format — typically a well-scoped, time-bound challenge based around a series of daily prompts or creative activity.

There are lots of great examples you may have seen, including:

• NaNoWriMo: write a novel in a month
• Inktober: daily drawing prompts
• Ship 30 for 30: a month of essay writing
• 100 Day Project: daily creative output for 100 days

This kind of structure is useful in many ways — as external motivation, spark for creative play, container for habit formation, and shared social context for independent work.

We have ideas for types of challenges that could work well — but for the Challenge Garden, we want to see what happens when we each design our own. In the future, we can build on this to create some awesome ones for everyone, and organize ways to share and do challenges with friends.

Challenge Garden: How to Participate

Here's the structure: design a seven-day challenge, with a theme + prompt for each of the seven days. We'll start the challenges on Monday Nov 22nd, and end on Sunday Nov 28th.

Before we start, we'll each share the challenges we've designed by this Friday, Nov 19. Details below!

Phase 1: Plant Your Prompts

• Pick a creative practice or theme to explore; you can start broad (poetry; photography) and narrow down a bit (verse forms; composition) if that helps clarify your ideas
• Brainstorm a list of potential prompts for your topic — they should be simple to describe, specific enough to be useful, and attainable in a realistic amount of time
• Pick 7 prompts for the week; these can be in a specific sequence, but don't have to be
• Announce this on Twitter by Friday! Tag @hyperlink_a and mention "Challenge Garden" — and if you like, invite others to follow / join :)

Phase 2: Seven Days to Sprout

• Starting Monday, make a thread on Twitter and add each day's output in a new tweet (either add to your initial thread, or quote tweet each prompt in a new thread)
• If you'd rather not use Twitter, feel free to collect in Notion or Google Docs and send us a link!
• We'll all start together and share — our own and yours — as we go

Example Challenges

Here are a few general possibilities to get you thinking:

• Go on a photography walk, early each morning, with a different constraint each day
• Series of poems, each on the same general topic, experimenting with different meters or forms
• One page daily comic, each in a different visual style
• Curate 10 images from a favorite online museum or library archive each day

Let's Get Started!

To summarize:

• Create your own creative challenge — 7 days of prompts — by Friday 11/19
• Starting Monday 11/22, we'll all post our daily results in a Twitter thread (or however you like!)

Feel free to hop in the Discord and run any ideas by us for feedback. Also appreciate if you can help spread the word on Twitter.

Let's keep it simple and have fun with this, bend the above guidelines, play with related ideas… We're excited to see how this goes!

—The Hyperlink Team