Review week 44; 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 GTD system?

Blog performance
I’m not writing a lot at the moment, not because of lack of inspiration though. More because of lack of time. There’s a lot going on at work that needs a lot of my close attention and it causes me to need a lot of sleep. It lingers on in my mind and it hinders me to write well enough to publish the posts. I know it will clear up soon, so I’ll be publishing more posts in due time.

In the mean time I am getting fed up with my blog design, or the coding behind it anyway. I’m working on making a new Wordpress theme, and after careful consideration I have decided to go against common opinion and build one from scratch. I feel a strong need to really understand what’s going on behind the scenes, so I can thoroughly understand what plug-ins do for instance.

I bought a book about HTML and CSS basics, to get a solid background in understanding them too. Most of it I knew already, but I learned a lot of detail that help me to comply with standards and I understand how the div’s work and how floating works and why margins, borders and padding do or don’t collapse. And I learned that IE6 is full of errors when it comes down to complying to the standard…

One of the other reasons to work on the design is that, as far as I can tell right now, this theme is not ready to support Wordpress 2.3. Knowing what’s going on behind the scenes will help me to understand future upgrades better. And I think it’s fun too!

In building a theme, there are two main parts:

• the ‘engine’
  These are php-pages, that build the (x)html page that is displayed. They consist of html coding and Wordpress database-calls. These are for instance index.php, header.php, sidebar.php and so on.
• The ‘bodywork’
  This is how everything looks. This is mostly done in a cascading style sheet, style.css. Mostly, because part of the design is contained in what you decide to show (post title, tags, category, date, comments, etc.) and in what order, and that’s part of the engine.

Although I like how my current theme looks, there are improvements on both sides. To give you a short overview:

• I’m dropping the second sidebar, as I feel it makes the design too cluttered.
• The sidebar is going to be wider to accommodate for more spacious navigation lists and some ad-banners.
• I’m integrating the header-image, the blog’s title and my picture into one header image to clear up space -> more content above the fold.
• I’m doing some SEO work to improve the theme (for instance there are no h1 or h2 headings in this theme oddly enough).
• I’m minimizing database-calls to increase loading speed and decrease server-load (database-calls require CPU time).

I’ve built a large part of the engine already, and it works. There’s a great plug-in called Admin Theme Preview that lets you preview a theme, without going live. Great for testing and on the fly coding. Anyway, I have more work to do, but it’s fun and I think the new design and the Wordpress upgrade will be up later this week (towards the weekend). Stats this week are not bad, given the fact that I only wrote one article.

Statistics week 44
Average RSS subscribers:	443	-3
Average daily visitors:	213	-74
Technorati Authority:	210	+6

Progress towards goals
Last week I wrote that I was going to rephrase some of my goals, I haven’t done this yet. I’ll indicate the ones that I think need rephrasing in the table below.

Material State
1.	Garden redone by 12-2007	Again some preparation, I need to buy a wooden gate, but it has some specifics and I haven’t found the right solution yet. But I have the feeling that I’m close to finding it.
2.	2nd floor redone by 12-2007	Some progress. I ordered new materials to continue work.
3.	€500 passive income by 03-2008	Blog income is even declining a bit. I did get a pagerank this week! I’m PR4 now, maybe the income stream will grow a bit because of it. The new design is also better suited for blog income.
Active State
4.	NLP Practitioner certification by 12-2007	This weekend is a training weekend again. In a couple of hours I start the day again, reframing and change personal history techniques are on the agenda.
5.	2500 subscribers by 12-2007	No growth, so I’m getting behind. No articles is no growth. I’ll publish more articles soon, as I’ve explained before.
6.	Given first training as trainer by 03-2008	No progress this week (again).
Social State
7.	Rising early	ACCOMPLISHED
8.	Contact friends and family 4 days a week	Three times. This goal needs rephrasing, it’s an activity instead of a goal and there is no end date.
Emotional State
9.	Review mission and goals weekly	Conducting it right now. This goal needs rephrasing, it’s an activity instead of a goal and there is no end date.
10.	Quarterly retreat	Starts January 2008 This goal needs rephrasing, it’s an activity instead of a goal and there is no end date.
Physical State
11.	Workout 5 days a week	Only once this week. This goal needs rephrasing, it’s an activity instead of a goal and there is no end date.
12.	Run half a marathon in 10-2008	No progress. I did not run this week, I was mainly sleeping in the mornings. I needed that more than I needed to run.

Getting Things Done – weekly review
How long can I go on without making any progress here? It doesn’t feel as if I’m not making any progress though. But my actions are more towards reducing the amount of projects I’m undertaking simultaneously and by doing so improving my overall productivity.

At work I have things organized quite neatly still. I have a good system that works there, and I’m making good progress and have a good overview of the things that need to get done.

At home I’m first reducing and decluttering, before I’m setting up a new system. I want to start it with a clean slate so to speak. So I’m deferring this activity to a later date, after I have decluttered my desk, my pc and my projects. It makes re-implementing GTD much easier, and essentially this is part of GTD too, just in a different order. I don’t put everything in my inbox I can find, but I judge things when I find them and if the action is archive or throw away, I take that action instantly. So everything in the inbox will be stuff that really needs to be in my system.

Posted in black eyed peas on Sun 2007.11.04