I switched to NaNoGenMo because of similar commitment problems.

Pros:

Pros:

You will probably produce much more than one novel. (I usually produce one during the first half-hour of November 1st just to get it out of the way, and then work on more interesting / complicated projects afterward)
There’s a pretty active community, with deep and precise discussions of things like structure and themes, because computer generation of long-form narratives that remain interesting to humans over the course of 90+ pages is a hard problem.

Cons:

You need to know how to code
The novels you generate will be even less likely to be salable than the hurried work of an amateur human novelist
Explaining the concept to people who aren’t familiar with it is even harder than explaining NaNoWriMo, because a lot of people are somehow unaware that computers can write books