Review week 19-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

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

I’ve been working a lot on Scraping Pennies this past week. There are still a couple of things I need to do on the design, but it’s live now! So if you’re interested in my fully transparent experiment on making money online, do follow that link.

The stats.
FeedBurner is again not reporting all subscribers. This time it’s the Google Subscribers who are missing in action. And that hurts the stats a lot, because most of you use Google Reader or iGoogle as the feedreader. I corrected for the missing stats, to find out the subscribers are stable. No change there.

Visitors increased, as did Technorati. I did not look into new stats for How to be an Original this week. But I will drop Technorati as a metric. It doesn’t fit the purpose of the blog.

Progress towards goals

A lot of progress on launching the other blogs. They’re part of my goals on the “Active State”, however I haven’t formulated the goal yet. I have to sit on that one for an hour or so, to get a clear grip on what it is exactly what I want to achieve there. More detail is good there.

Productivity Habits - weekly review

I finished a project this weekend, that I have been procrastinating for a looong time. The (video editing) project wasn’t really serving any of my goals, but I promised family that I’d do it. Add a lot of software crashes, inaccessible video project files and frozen computers while rendering and you get the feeling why I totally lost the fun in the project and procrastinated it even more.

Thanks to the shout-out by Dave “Lemme kick your a$$” Navarro who challenged his twitter friends to spend 30 to 60 minutes on something they’d been putting off for a long time, I decided to start it again. And we (my wife and me) added to the challenge to not only work on it, but also by finishing it. We invited the people we promised it to over for dinner this weekend. Deadlines do work. It’s finished now. Freed up some mind space

On another account, I noticed that when I really focus on a project (like designing Scraping Pennies) I don’t need to write tasks down in lists. I tried making lists of tasks in Remember The Milk for that project, but I found it only distracted me. So I stopped putting the tasks for SP in the list, but added everything that came to mind while I was working on SP. That really boosted my focus, because as soon as I got distracted by a thought, I wrote it down, and got back to work.

Maybe I’m cussing in the face of productivity systems, but I found that the bigger the projects, the more working with lists deteriorates my productivity. I just need to start and free my mind of all the miscellaneous small stuff that pops up. That’s what I want on my lists, because those I keep forgetting.