Another month, another shortform writing challenge is done. As a quick recap, I invited you to write a shortform about a headline and the opening paragraph of a story you’d love to read in tomorrow’s newspaper.

As I hoped, you dove deep into creativity. These three are my favorites of this challenge:

Sean F Corbin came up with a story about society and in part, politics:

Rosy Gee has a more personal piece, yet also full of hope and wishes:

Dylan Martin whereas got a more satirical piece, nevertheless entertaining:

I also want to thank Fiza Ameen, Dishit Devasia, and…

Get on the party hats! We’ve just doubled the follower count at The Shortform in less than two months!

On June, 7th I’ve published a celebrating story on achieving 200 followers. Since I had founded this publication on the 4th of December last year, it took roughly 6 months to grow this big.

What’s mind-blowing is we just needed two months to add another 200 followers. This surely has a lot to do with recent recommendations from fellow writers like Nick and Burk.

In case you were wondering, I’ve got you some stats from inside The Shortform: In the last 30 days, we’ve amassed 5,956 reading minutes and we are visited by a daily average of 175 unique people. Great stuff!

As always, feel free to introduce yourself here. Also, the next writing challenge is waiting for you! I’ll keep you posted!

You know the drill with your reading list. What really excites me is you can now create custom-named lists displayed on a separate section of your profile page. The new function includes these features:

1. You can add stories from others authors as well as your own. Create a curation of helpful articles or build a portfolio out of your best-performing stories.
2. Stories can appear on multiple lists.
3. They can be shared and found on your profile page. They even have designated description fields.
4. They can paint a bigger picture of who you are on this platform. …

What seems counter-intuitive at first, but is actually so true: We can't take proper care of others if we don't take care of ourselves.

I really don't know where this unhealthy habit of glorifying the neglect of your own needs comes from. In office culture, the hero sits until midnight on an important project, sacrificing his own health when constantly sleeping too little hours. I comes down to some kind of rat race who can survive on less hours of daily sleep. How can you deliver excellent results walking and acting like a zombie?

The same goes for families, and…

It may have gone unnoticed so far, but Medium just unlocked a new functionality called Lists. A new section called by this name appeared on your About page recently, and that’s pretty much it.

What seems like no big deal is actually huge for the creators. I’ll provide some features of the new List function and how it benefits you.

#1: You can add stories from other authors and your own as well

The other day, I had to attend a meeting with my deputy manager. As my boss is on vacation, he’s in charge of running my department. Putting it frankly, the deputy really likes to talk. Moreover, he’s desperate in his efforts to delete that deputy from his title. You know, moving up the management food chain. Full try-hard ladder climber.

This is why he makes sure to hold at least one team meeting per week where we talk through every small topic happening in the department right now. My boss himself is more the laissez-faire kind of manager. …