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?

This week was kind of a lost week as far as goals and blogging was concerned. Last Monday my left elbow started hurting, and it was clear that there was an inflammation of some sort in there. Turns out it’s bursitis of the elbow aka “Student’s Elbow“. I needed to rest it completely in the first days, so I had my arm in a sling. Now the swelling is considerably less, and I can use my arm again but only for mild activities. And I’m not allowed to lean on the elbow entirely, but that’s something I don’t want to do anyway (pain!).

With one arm in a sling, my typing skills reduced considerably. From 10 fingers, down to 2 effectively. And ctrl-alt-del is impossible with one hand! Anyway, I can type with 10 fingers again now the swelling has reduced.

Blog performance

Average daily subscribers:	1062	( 23)
Average daily visitors:	194	( 37)

This was a quiet week as far as new posts are concerned. I don’t have a bunch of posts lying around for situations like these (I know I should), but thankfully I had a guest post lined up for this week at The Thirty Day Year. I had a lot of fun writing it, trying something new with a lot of fiction-esque writing in the post. I loved how you can let your imagination run free with it. I’ll be doing more of that!

I also didn’t publish anything on the Scraping Pennies this week. Not even the weekly income report. By the time I wanted to write that, my elbow was really hurting so I skipped that one.

Subscribers are steadily rising, visitors showed a little drop. Overall I’m very happy with the blog’s performance during an “off-week”.

Progress towards goals

Obviously there’s no progress this week.

Renovation Project
Status:
Overdue, since 02/2008.
Progress this week:
No progress. Arm needs rest.
Planning next week:
Resting my arm, making sure it gets well.

Semi Marathon training
Status:
On hold, but still on schedule. Deadline is October 12, 2008.
Progress this week:
I did not run this week. With one arm in a sling, it’s not nice to run. Didn’t buy the shoes yet either.
Planning next week:
Resting my arm, making sure it gets well.

Productivity Habits - weekly review

I noticed a funny thing this week. Since my typing speed went down by over 80%, perspectives change on some aspects. A quick email, suddenly isn’t so quick anymore. I decided more often to just call people, or walk by their office to ask or answer a question.

It made me realize that a lot of productivity tips I have shared here, are also based on hidden assumptions of skill levels. Now that I experienced a serious drop in certain skills, I found that not all productivity tips are equally productive if you don’t have the skill set to execute them correctly or timely.

This stresses the importance of adopting what works for you, and dropping what doesn’t. You need to find the best tools for you. What works for me, may not work for you. Heck, sometimes it even doesn’t work for me either

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?

A day late is not an excuse to skip it.

Blog performance

YES! It has taken a while to get from 900+ to 1000+ subscribers, but the average number of subscribers last week was 1049! It feels great to finally get past that milestone.

Visitor numbers are pretty steady around 200 - 250 a day for quite while now. And they are pretty evenly divided across the week as well. Weekends a little slower than Monday through Thursday.

Progress towards goals

There’s hardly any progress on these goals this week. I was babysitting most of the week last week (at least that’s how it felt).

Renovation Project
Status:
Overdue, since 02/2008.
Progress this week:
Hardly any progress. Made the drawings for the construction with sliding doors and windowsill, and bought the materials I need. That’s all.
Planning next week:
Buying radiators. Making the framework for the construction.

Semi Marathon training
Status:
On schedule. Deadline is October 12, 2008.
Progress this week:
I did not run this week. That’s partly because I went to a shop specialized in running gear. They made a video of my running pattern and showed me that I need anti-pronation shoes for running. However I have such a small size feet that they did not have any stock in my size. It’s on order now.
Planning next week:
Buying the right shoes.

Productivity Habits - weekly review

Nothing here for this week either (just like last week).

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

No statistics at all this week. I’m dropping Technorati as a metric on this blog, and FeedBurner has been bouncing up and down with incomplete statistics all week long. The numbers are so unrealiable that it’s even hard to figure out it should’ve been. All I’ll say is: they’re moving in the right direction.

I also joined the blogging pack at the Authority Blogger forum. It’s an idea inspired by this post by Michael Martine at Remarkablogger. It actually has evolved into something totally different than Michael meant in his article, but nevertheless it’s an interesting project.

Progress towards goals

I cleaned up the table in this section. So much so that the table is no longer there. It was taking up a lot of space for only two active goals at this time.

Renovation Project
Status:
Overdue, since 02/2008.
Progress this week:
Fairly good progress this week. Painted walls the walls this week (2 coats).
Planning next week:
Installing radiators for heating and making a design for a construction with sliding doors and the windowsill.

Semi Marathon training
Status:
On schedule. Deadline is October 12, 2008.
Progress this week:
I did only one run this week, a short 3 kilometer interval training with an average speed of a little over 11 km/h. I started using MyAsics this week. Not the shoes, but the website. It’s a service provided by Asics, and provides training schedules, logbooks and much more. I’ve set up a training schedule for the semi marathon. Based on my fitness level and four training days a week, my optimum end date is somewhere in August. Enough time to meet the deadline, and there’s room to make up for delays.
Planning next week:
Buying proper running shoes in a shop specialized in running gear. And running according to schedule, 4 times next week.

Productivity Habits - weekly review

Nothing really special to say about this topic at this point. Maybe next week.

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.

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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?

I’m a day late with my weekly review, but that’s no excuse not to do it. I will focus on the past week and not include today (because I did a good run today, but you’ll read about that next week).

Blog performance

The post on Monday was short. I think some of you may even have thought that I published that post by accident. I didn’t, but I intended to write a post at first. I had found the poem and the picture to go along with the message I was trying to get across, but I couldn’t get it on paper the way I wanted it.

So I decided to do something I normally don’t do, and that was to just hit publish with only the poem and the picture. They carried the message I wanted to say anyway, and I thought it might break the pattern I was in. And it did. It took away the pressure of having a post on Monday, and gave room to find other quotes and put the message across. It turned out to be my post on Passionate People.

With that post I also redefined my blog. I will change some stuff around the blog, but it will still be my voice (even more so) and the topics that I have on my mind. I will change the categories though, so they fit the new blog definition better. I’m also going to introduce tags, to better identify the topics that a post is about. You’ll notice the difference in the coming weeks.

The stats.
Quelle surprise! Last week I really stopped caring about Technorati, and now my Authority is up. On a closer look though, it’s mostly because of sploggers so they’re not even “real” links. I’m going to drop this statistic from my weekly reports.

Feedburner was not doing a great job reporting the correct number of subscribers this week, leaving out several sources. So I had to do a little intrapolation to get to the correct stats for the subscriber numbers. And they’re moving in the right direction.

Visitors are stable, again without any stumbleupon traffic. I noticed that the time spent on the blog increased a lot in the past couple of weeks. Hmm, that might be a good statistic to start reporting.

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