A five-day challenge, written out in full

What shape this is

Every day has the same four parts in the same order: the action, why it works, how to do it, and one line about tomorrow. The repetition is the design. Somebody who has done two of these already knows where to look for today's instruction, and does not have to read an email to find out what is being asked of them.

The pacing is built around day three. Day one is smaller than it needs to be, because the best predictor of finishing a five-day challenge is finishing day one. Day three is the most immediately rewarding action of the five, because that is the morning the novelty has gone and the end is not close enough to pull anybody. Day four names the mistake that undoes the other four days, and day five ties them together.

What each morning asks:

• Day one is the smallest useful version of the action, ten minutes, with a simpler fallback that still counts.
• Day two is the same action with one thing changed, and the mechanism that makes the changed version the one that works.
• Day three is the most satisfying action of the five, and it says out loud that today is the day people stop.
• Day four is the same action while watching for the failure mode, with three checks a reader can run against their own work.
• Day five is the version that ties the week together, then a list of what they have now that did not exist on day one, including the smallest sustainable version of it.

Who it suits

Anybody whose subject improves with repetition: a photographer, a language teacher, somebody teaching a daily practice. It also suits a subject where the first attempt is usually bad, because five attempts in five days produce an improvement the reader can see without being told about it.

It suits you badly when the action takes an hour, or when doing it once badly is worse than not doing it at all. A challenge whose daily ask quietly grows past twenty minutes loses most of its participants somewhere in the middle and never finds out why.

It needs three things from you:

• One action that fits in ten to twenty minutes and survives being repeated five times with a small change each day.
• A known sticking point, and a simpler version that still counts, so that a bad morning does not end the week.
• An honest smallest version for afterwards, because most people cannot sustain a daily anything.

How this one is built

Every one of the five opens on a bold line beginning with the word today, and that line carries the whole instruction. Everything under it is optional. It is the structural decision the rest of the challenge is arranged around: somebody reading on a phone in a queue has the ask in the first line and can close the email having got what they came for.

Below the bold line the order never changes. Why this version works, then how to do it under a heading, then the reply request, then a line naming tomorrow. Four of the five carry numbered steps under that heading, and the count falls from three on the first two mornings to two on the third and two on the last. Day four has no steps at all, only three checks to run against work that already exists.

The reply is asked for on all five mornings, in the same position, and it costs one word. It is the only thing this challenge ever requests beyond the action itself. A challenge that adds a second request somewhere in the middle has told its participants that the reply was never really the point.

The subject lines are numbered like a teaching course but they are doing something else underneath. The first two name the action. The third names the problem rather than the task, which is the only morning where that happens. The fourth names the mistake, and the fifth is two words after its number. The shortest subject line in the set sits on the morning that needs the least persuasion.

The preheaders carry the time cost, which is the number a participant is actually deciding on. The first says ten minutes and admits the task is smaller than expected, the second says the shape has not changed, the third says today is small, and the last two say what the morning is about. None of the five tries to sell the day it belongs to.

The same five moves, in the same order, on every one of the five mornings:

• The action, in bold, in the first line, beginning with the word today.
• Why this version of it works, in a sentence or two, after the instruction rather than before it.
• How to do it, under a heading, as numbered steps or as checks.
• The reply request, in the closing line, costing one word.
• A sentence naming tomorrow, except on the last morning, where it names what the participant now has.

How to read the brackets

Everything in square brackets is a hole. The method, the numbers, the names and the invitation are all left out, and the sign-up copy is bracketed in the same way, so a course published without being read announces itself on its own sign-up page rather than reading as bland and finished.

The links are placeholders too. Each one points at a reserved documentation domain rather than at a real page, so they are printed below as the words they label rather than as links to follow: a course sent with them untouched would take strangers to somebody else's site in your name.

No email names a weekday, and that is not an oversight. Each course starts on the morning its reader confirms, so day three is a Saturday for one reader and a Tuesday for the next. Days are named by their number, and a weekday appears only inside a bracket, where it is a fact about you rather than about the reader.

What it asks for, and how often

This challenge asks for two things and never for anything else. Do the action, which takes between ten and twenty minutes, and reply when it is done. Both appear on all five mornings, in the same places, and neither grows.

The reply is the part worth noticing. It costs one word, it is asked for in the same position every day, and nothing is ever done with it inside the challenge: no leaderboard, no public thread, nobody named in the next morning email. It is a private mark that the morning happened, and the fact that it goes nowhere is what makes it cheap enough to give.

The size of the ask, morning by morning:

• Ten minutes, with a smaller fallback that counts exactly the same.
• The same ten to twenty minutes, with one element of the task changed.
• Fifteen minutes, and the email offers five as an acceptable answer.
• The action again with something to watch for, then three checks against the result.
• The version that ties the week together, in two steps, and then it stops.

What is not here, and why

The guide this copy was written from describes seven emails and this challenge is five. Both of the missing ones are missing for the same reason: they are messages that are not a day of the course. One arrives before it starts, telling a participant what to have ready, and belongs to the confirmation they get when they join. The other is the offer, which arrives the morning after the final action.

Writing either of them as a day would put a course day where the product does not have one, and it would also break the thing this challenge spends five mornings counting. A participant told there are five mornings and then sent seven emails has been given a different challenge from the one advertised.

What a writer usually adds to a challenge, and what it costs:

• A leaderboard, or a public list of who has finished. It converts the participants who are behind into an audience for the ones who are not.
• A daily ask that grows. Ten minutes on the first morning and forty by the fourth is the commonest way the middle of a challenge empties out.
• An offer inside the last email. That morning belongs to the participant, and an ask in it converts the achievement into the close of a sale.
• A named weekday for the hardest morning. The third day is the third day of this reader's own week, and the date it lands on is different for every one of them.