Ok, I just gave myself a kick in the butt. Last week I wrote that I’m starting this weekly review habit again. But first I need goals for the review, or so I thought. I gave myself two weeks to define those goals, and I’m progressing nicely towards defining them.
Yet that’s hardly an excuse to skip the first weekly review. Starting a habit by skipping is not very promising. And defining new goals can be seen as a goal in itself – albeit one for the short term. So here it goes:
Defining new goals
The process of defining new goals has started last week, and the first step was revisiting my personal core values. The next step is to take another look at my mission statement and then set goals accordingly.
This is a process that takes time, since it’s a growth process. Growth process can only be sped up to a certain point. If you go too fast you’ll just end up with results that need some more processing or that don’t feel right – yet.
In growth processes you need some time for your thoughts and feelings to settle as you, and your insight grow. And some stuff simply needs to be slept on for a couple of nights. If you take the time for it to settle, you’ll notice that good stuff emerges.
Besides the introspection activities of looking at my values and mission statements, I also looked through my previous weekly reviews for inspiration on how to do these weekly reviews in a way that’s better. One thing was obvious, it needed a better title. The title of the weekly review was always the same (except for the weeknumber).
Second thing: Trim down on the number of goals. I already discovered and remembered this, too many goals will dilute both focus and time. So I decided to have only three goals:
- one focused on result – in order to achieve something specific
- one focused on effort – in order to do something specific
- one focused on fun – simply for fun
Thirdly, I noticed that deadlines that are too far into the future are neither motivating nor scaring me. So I need to work with smaller chunks for goals. The period I’m going to use is six weeks (inspired by a particular scene in Fight Club).
The fourth thing I (re)discovered was the consistent tracking of blog metrics. That’s something I’m going to do again too. And I’ll be talking about what I’ve done and plan to do on the blog. To make it better and to let it grow of course (it is a core value after all).
So my take-aways from this review:
- I already set myself a goal, and I’m reviewing it now
- The reviews need better titles than they used to have
- I’m going to set three goals only
- I want to work with deadlines six weeks away
- I’m going to track blog progress again and talk about blogging every now and then
Blog performance
The blog metrics I will be tracking are average subscriber numbers over the past week and average daily visitors. Those are the most important metrics in my opinion. You’ll see the numbers next week.
I did do some work on the blog this past week:
- added category pictures below the posts. You’ll see an image of black eyed peas below this particular post for instance.
- added the “New? Start here!” page
- added the “Search” page
- added the “Explore” section to the sidebar
- customized the 404 page to suit the bean theme better
That’s it for now. More next week (promise!).
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I’m quite envious of your horde of previous reviews that you can now review and improve. In my mind, this is ultimate consciousness. I hope to be in your shoes this time next year!