I simply do not have the emotional, psychological, and physical bandwidth to manage Twitter. I take everything at face value and I take everything really personally. It’s just how I am and Twitter is unhealthy for someone like me. I’ve been coping with Twitter for years and it’s time to pull the plug.Twitter: Goodbye, I Quit - John Saddington
Wow! I'm in awe of John for doing this. I've considered doing the same. Not with Twitter. But Facebook. I just seem to get too emotionally entangled in what happens on Facebook. I end up feeling hurt. Emotionally. For the last few week's I've avoided it. But I have not quit ... yet. The closet I've come to abandoning Facebook was last year when I suspended my account for a week. Nothing bad happened. I wasn't missed. The world did not end. Am I brave enough to do it again? Permanently!
Goals. For some it's a dreaded word. It means thinking about what you want to accomplish and then putting a plan in place to accomplish it. It can be scary because you may not know what you want to accomplish. Maybe you have not spent any time thinking about it. It can be scary because when you sit to plan your action to archive your goals, the amount of work involve makes the goal seem unattainable. Some people avoid planning on purpose. When you don't have a plan your plans are ambiguous and you can always excuse yourself for not achieving your goals. After all, you didn't commit to anything. You can let yourself off the hook.
I've worked in the corporate world for a long time. I've been trained to work in a business environment that prefers accountability and responsibility. I was trained on the S.M.A.R.T method for setting objectives. My bonus was based on how well I performed in achieving objectives. Between me and my manager we worked out what the goals were for the year. But we needed a framework for knowing if the goals had been met. S.M.A.R.T provided that framework.
For my manager, my yearly objectives needed to be:
Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
Achievable/Actionable – things that are not possible are pointless to attempt
Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
Time-bound – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.
John wanted me to think about my objectives -- goals -- for this blog. This required some thought. I've blogged for so long that the goals for the blog have morphed over time. Time to put some thought into what I want to accomplish. At least for 2015.
I want to develop a writing and publishing routine in 2015. I want to publish a few articles per week, focused on the topic of photography, tutorials/tips, and thoughts on both of those other two topics. I want to encourage more social interaction around the articles I write and I want to write more evergreen content. I'm not sure that is specific enough but that's what quickly came to my mind when I thought about it.
I think I can commit to writing two articles per week (roughly 8 per month). By the end of the year I should have 104 new articles on this blog. I think that's easily measured. Either I have 104 articles or not. More is better but less it not. I don't yet have a plan for increasing more social activity -- comments on the blog or via twitter -- on my posts. I'm not even sure where to start. Perhaps I should remove that goal until I know what to do?
I think I can commit to writing 20-30 minute per day toward my goal. I think this is achievable and realistic. Family, work and volunteer obligations may require adjustment of my priorities. Realistically I don't think I can publish more than two articles per week. This once-day writing scheduling has been challenging.
So that's my S.M.A.R.T objectives for this blog in 2015. What do you think? Achievable? Do you have any tips or ideas that may help? Leave a comment in the box below.
I don't use Google Analytics. I removed that code from my blog a while ago. In fact, I divorced myself from many Google Services. I shut down my YouTube account. I stopped using Google Calendar and Google Drive. I removed Chrome from my computer. I still have a Gmail account that gets a lot of use, but I am attempting to move people to my hosted email. I do use Google+ but only for public posting of public content. I use it as a long-form version of Twitter. It seems that with Google Services, once they are all connected, Google gets more benefit from the arrangement than I do. So, good riddance.
Last year I used the WordPress.com analytics provided via the JetPack plugin. It may not be as feature-rich as Google Analytics, but it does the job. One of the lesser-known features of JetPack is that each user gets a customised Year in Review annual report each year. Go check out my 2014 Annual Report.
My top three posts in 2014 were articles I wrote in 2012. That's pathetic. Really. That tells me I have some evergreen content, but it might also mean I need to write more. Or it might also mean that most of my content in 2014 wasn't very good—something to think about.
Most of the traffic to my blog was via a photo blogging site by David Hunt and social media, especially Google+. David Hunt has an article about one of his Raspberry Pi projects that links to my top post. The one above that got 73 comments. Speaking of comment, the most commented-on post in 2014 was Insulin pumps may not be the best thing for me.
As for my readership demographics? It's all over the map, but mostly the US, Germany and the U.K. I'm unsure how to use these numbers to help me improve my blogging. This sort of data analytics isn't my forte.
Yesterday, I installed Piwik, an open-source web analytics platform. The software was easy to install and configure, but there isn't much I can say about it with only one day of data.
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