New category structure, or how time catches up on procrastinating productivity bloggers eventually

If you’re a long time visitor to How to be an Original, you might have noticed that I’ve changed my categories this week. This was a job I wanted to do for a long time, but I have been procrastinating it for a long time.

Yes, even productivity bloggers procrastinate at times. That’s partly because we don’t always follow our own advice, but also because procrastination isn’t always bad. In Producticity Secrets I wrote: “Procrastination separates the urgent from the non-urgent tasks.”, changing my category structure wasn’t urgent at all. I even had doubts whether it was even important.

Covey’s quadrants in full swing

That all changed when I moved to Dreamhost. In the process the categories didn’t come through as they should have. I won’t go into the technical details, but in short: I just screwed up. Changing the category structure (or getting my old structure back) suddenly became urgent. I still wasn’t sure about their importance though.

That too, changed rapidly. Only days after writing that I kicked ass because I was on Alltop, my feed was taken down again. ACK! That’s not good at all. I soon figured out that it was most likely due to the fact that almost all my feed items changed over night, because they publish a category-feed! The same is true for the ultimate GTD index, and when I checked my status there, it quickly became clear that my category-feed was all messed up.

That sure was experiencing first-hand how the dynamics work throughout the quadrants of Covey’s time leadership matrix! Useful? Yeah. Enjoyable? Hmm.

The new categories

Back to the categories: the need for working on the category structure did not solve the very reason of my procrastination. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do with them! But I’d better figure that out fast, because I needed to fix them on short notice.

The approach I took was to first sit down with my moleskine and start writing, drawing, mindmapping and so on. This usually sets my thoughts in motion. After that I sat down behind the computer and browsed my own blog thoroughly.

That was fun! I “discovered” quite some old posts that I had forgotten about. And somehow they pointed me towards what the category structure should be, and that a category - subcategory structure would fit me best. In the footer there’s a sentence about what How to be an Original is:

“How to be an Original is about discovering who you are, deciding what you want and learning how to get it.”

There you have it, it states the three main topics:

• WHO are you
• WHAT do you want
• HOW to get it

Not all posts fit into those three, so I made two more categories. One of the is called “My Story“, and it contains all the posts that are about me and my path towards living my legend, changing my habits, achieving goals and being productive. In the post about passionate bloggers I stated that How to be an Original is a personal blog, and I stand by that statement. But it’s also a topical blog, and the new category structure reflects that pretty well.

And yes, there’s one more category. It’s called “The Other Stuff“, and it contains…pretty much everything that doesn’t fit into any of the other categories. It’s kind of like the purgatory, only more fun

Meta-blogging

I realize that this is another post in which I write about writing, or blog about blogging. They are not the main focus of this blog, and as such they are in the sub-category “General” that resides under “The Other Stuff”. Enuff said?

Image by laffy4k