Review week 08-2008; 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 productivity habits? 

Blog performance

Nothing special on the blog this week. I’ve been pretty busy with my day job and with the renovation project, leaving not a lot of room for writing blog posts. Especially considering our nights have been pretty strange last week with our son waking us up a lot!

While writing this I have to think about the new habit I’m building. This week I started creating daily planning sheets to plan my activities during the day. “Not leaving a lot of room for writing blog posts” can be viewed in an entirely different way. I can just schedule them in right? To see how I work with the sheets, scroll down to the productivity section of this Weekly Review.

Added advertisement options
I changed something to the blog design as well, creating more room for some advertisements. Not too much, because I want to keep the blog design simple and uncluttered. But it’s nice to create some income with it. For those interested, I use a plugin to manage the advertisements and payments. It’s called OIO Publisher and it takes care of the entire process.

It’s a pretty sweet plugin that’s available for only $37. You can do a lot with it, from banners and text links to inline ads and paid blog posts. That’s way more than I’m using it for, I use only the banner function. It lets you “cut out the middlemen”, like Text Link Ads or any of the banner networks. They also have a marketplace lined up, to which you can submit your site, but I’m not using it.

Ads that haven’t been sold can be filled with a standard image (like the “advertise here” image) or by “default ads”. Those default ads are ads you make as well, but using other service like affiliate links. My ad spots are all filled with those Who wants to have the honor of being my first paid advertiser? Take your pick!

The stats
No strong movements here, but all stats in the green is always a nice sight.

Progress towards goals

I made some strong progress towards the renovation project this week. I already told you guys that my skills in estimating the amount of time it takes to get a job done is not that good, but it’s improving! There’s way more work than I can get done in a week, but I’m getting there in a steady pace. Today is a day filled with renovation work again, big stuff even. I have to work on the pipes of the watersupply. And some work with a jackhammer, I was surprised at how heavy it is to use that tool!

Training for the marathon…ouch. What training? All the training I get at the moment is the workout from renovating. I do notice that it has a lot of effect, I’m losing weight and gaining muscle. So I’m more sleek and improving my air resistance characteristics Hey, you got to keep looking at the bright side of things. I’m just glad that I have a goal that has a deadline I haven’t missed!

Productivity Habits - weekly review

I renamed this section. It’s really about my productivity habits. Zen to Done and Getting Things Done have been and still are important, but there’s more to productivity than only those two.

This week I started using daily planning sheets to plan my time during the day, after reading Dave Navarro’s book. Like I said earlier this week, it’s been staring me in the face for a while. My dad for one, is one of the people who reminded me of it, when he sent me an email “Plan your work, work your plan” after missing a deadline.

I’m doing that now, or rather learning to do that now. Not being proficient enough in estimating the time it takes to do a job has been one of the reasons for missing deadlines. But when you’re not recording your experiences, how are you ever going to learn?

So I’m planning my days now, and recording actuals with comments about them along the way. It looks like this (click for a larger version):

You can see the big blank planning section on Friday and the beginning of Saturday. I actually planned Friday in my head when I went to bed on Thursday, but never wrote it down. I learned that writing it down is important, if you want to remember it… *sheepish grin*. 

I’ll be using these sheets all week long. If you like, you can download a copy of the daily planning sheet (pdf). I’ll probably be tweaking it this week, now that I’m building some experience with it. I’ll post an update about it on Friday. There will be no weekly review next week as I’ll be out of town the first week of March without an internet connection (as far as I know).