Review week 01-2008; Goals, blog and GTD

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my Getting Things Done system and Zen to Done habits?

Blog performance

I’ve been busy with a lot of other activities the past week, so much so that I had hardly any time left to write blog posts. Part of the activities were planned, like working on the renovation of the 2nd floor. But there are also unplanned activities, like caring for a child who suffers from his molars breaking through (and I mean suffers!). It always amazes me how much energy it takes when you have to comfort a child that’s in pain and you can hardly do anything to alleviate it. Heavy stuff.

But even without a lot of new posts, subscriber numbers continue to increase. At this pace it will take forever to get to 2500 though, so I need to get my hands dirty and do some real work to achieve that number.

Oh, and I upgraded WordPress to the latest release. I added a weekly backup routine to it as well. Everything works fine, except for one plugin. The one that manages the Top Posts, you see in the sidebar on the right. The author doesn’t seem to respond anymore, so I might need to find another solution for that section.

Progress towards goals

A new list this week. I cleaned up the list from last week and took out all the accomplished goals and the ones I dropped. There’s a lot less clutter in the table and I like that!

I read a post on Zen Habits last week on how to make this year your best year yet. One of the main points of Leo is to have only one goal. Sure they’re big goals, but one goal nonetheless. This thought hasn’t left my mind and I was thinking about it while I was working on the renovation of the 2nd floor of our house last weekend. I have one goal that has top priority at the moment, and that is the renovation project. It’s not my only goal, but it has the highest priority.

Finishing the renovation project is an enabler for other goals in several ways. First, it’s going to be my home office. MY home office, not an office I share with my wife in which we rearrange each other’s stuff every now and then making it a not so optimal situation for both of us. Second, it’s going to free “mind-time”, because that unfinished project is no longer on my mind when I work on other projects. Third, it’s an enabler for making room for dedicated work on starting my own (part-time) business. And fourth, it going to free time to work on social and physical goals.

So the renovation project has been promoted to priority one, and I will be focusing on that goal primarily. The goal to reach 2500 subscribers is overdue (I added that label to it). I’m going to keep that goal as an overdue goal, as a reminder that the ambition is still alive and as a nag-factor to keep that goal as the most important of the rest. Rest of the goals that is, my family comes first so if my son or my wife needs me, I’m dropping it all to be there for them.

Zen to Done / Getting Things Done - weekly review

I’ll get that post on comparing different paper systems out this week. Promise!