Matthew Lang

With a rising interest in newsletters, I started one last year. I tried to publish one long-form post a month as well as a collection of links at the end.

I intended to keep this newsletter going through the year, but after a few months, I decided that a newsletter of this kind wouldn’t be of any additional value that my blog couldn’t already provide.

Now I’m also blogging on a daily basis, so there’s no need for such a newsletter, and most likely I’ll never publish a newsletter of this kind again.

The newsletter experiment did not succeed in the way I thought it would, but although I closed the newsletter down, I learned something valuable from the newsletter.

Newsletters themselves are great, but the real value of a newsletter is the niche the newsletter caters to. This niche could be an interest, a topic, a market or anything like that.

This year I’m starting a small side project to build a newsletter aimed at a specific type of organisation who are looking to make more effective use of their digital presence and other tools to help those organisations.

I’m sending out a few invites to sign up for some local organisations that meet this criterion. I’ll then run the newsletter for a few months, collecting feedback on the first few editions. If the feedback is positive, I’ll keep going. If it's terrible, I’ll adjust the content to either suit the feedback or close the newsletter down.

I’ve already got a landing page up and running and I just need to dig into how to send a welcome email to each new sign up. Once done, I’ll be ready to accept sign-ups as they come. I’m not going to market this though until I decide that it has any lasting value as a product.

There are a few added benefits from this experiment.

I get some hands-on experience with running a newsletter using MailChimp. TinyLetter was an ideal service for my previous newsletter, but for this newsletter, I need a few more features like more options for formatting emails and their content.

I can spend a bit of time researching and writing content for the newsletter. I’m budgeting a fixed number of hours a month for this, and in that time I need to have the material ready to send and handle any replies or feedback. A test of time management and improving my writing.

The final benefit is that this is a testbed to a more significant opportunity. I’m using the newsletter to gauge the interest in a range of services that could help a particular market. This newsletter will be the on-ramp to that range of products and services and will determine if there’s any value in them.

I think I’ve found a niche market with this newsletter but only time will tell. I do believe that this will have a better chance of success than my previous attempt at a newsletter, but the only indication of this is whether organisations that sign up for this and find it useful.

I've already written about how I use habits rather than resolutions for the year. Resolutions are doomed to fail, but practices can be iteratively built on over the year and eventually form a set of good habits.

How do you stay focused on these habits though?

Well, one way I've been able to build on these habits over the last couple of years is using Chris Brogan's three words. It's a simple idea.

You pick three words for that will guide your actions through the year. Through the course of the year, your efforts should align with these three words so that anything that you do is working towards them. The words themselves are goals, but not specific ones. Just parts of your life that you want to make better.

Last year my words were habit, health and hustle. I'm chuffed to say that at the end of 2017 I had lost a bit of weight and I'm now more active through the work week to stop myself getting any more back pain.

This year's words are less of a focus on health and work and more about content and delivery.

Bootstrap - For too long I've had a little email product running that has been running quietly in the background. It's time to bring it to the masses and bootstrap it from being merely just a product that people use to one that people rave about. Of course, I'm talking about DailyMuse. I want to expand this product so that it becomes more of a featured revenue stream than something I merely allow to run. DailyMuse isn't the only product in the pipeline though. I'm intrigued about a numberless analytics idea, and I'm interested in exploring a niche market for my web development skills that could help end the feast and famine cycle that is always at the back of my mind as a freelancer.

Blog - I remember the great days of blogging every day. It didn't matter what day it was. I punted something out anyway. This single word over the last two weeks has prompted me to write and publish more often already this month and look set to complete one week with a post a day.

Budget - When it comes to time, we only have so much of it. For 2018 I want to budget my time and energy through the week so that I'm not idling away my time in front of the television or on my phone. This isn't a call to budget every minute of every day. Scheduling my day in this way doesn't work for me. The plan is to spread my time, focus and energy over the week, rather than blitz everything in the one day. One way of doing this is to theme each day around a particular product or project.

I wouldn't say that 2017 was a significant success using this technique, but I did make some gains. I'm aiming to do better with my three words for 2018.

One of the significant problems with social media is that everything has a number against it. Followers, likes, retweets, hearts, comments and many more. Quantity is everything on social media, and yet there are so many people on social media creating content that many of us would like but we never get to see them thanks to timelines that are re-ordered for our so-called benefit.

When Manton Reece opened up Micro.blog last year to the public, I couldn’t find the number of followers that people had. Even one year on, Micro.blog still doesn’t use counts for followers and likes.

Manton explains:

It mirrors a philosophy we have with Micro.blog to launch without follower counts or public likes. Follower counts are not very useful for a new platform. They add anxiety and unavoidably lead to value judgements when considering whether to follow someone, instead of letting the quality of someone’s writing and photos speak for itself.

— Don’t worry about the numbers by Manton Reece

I love this approach. Less focus on the numbers and more emphasis on the content.

Recently, I removed all the analytics tracking from my blogs. A crazy move? Maybe, but I would like to think that my time is better served creating more content rather than worrying about how many people are reading it.

I would still like to see what people are reading and what the trending posts are on my blogs. I’m not interested in the numbers though, just what people are reading. And that’s got me wondering about an idea.

A numberless analytics dashboard.

Rather than serving up a dashboard of page views and visitors with numbers everywhere, this would serve up the titles of the posts that people are currently reading. Much in the same way that the trending widget does on Twitter. It would also show the most popular posts for the past month and year.

Terrible idea? It might be, but it's probably not the worst idea in the world and may be worth exploring.

Stay tuned for updates on this.

I'm not making any resolutions for the year ahead.

In my experience, it's a self-defeating exercise that always ends up with me not seeing it through to the end of the year.

If you're thinking along the same lines, then what's the alternative to making improvements without failing?

Have you ever noticed how bad habits stick like watching television, sitting on the couch, and mindlessly thumbing through timelines on social media? These are not good habits to get into, but the thing about them is that they're easy to do. They just don't require any thought whatsoever.

What if we could just as quickly get into good habits rather than bad habits?

Well, this is what worked for me when I first started building good habits.

I started with just one habit.

I started getting into the habit of writing every day. To help remind myself to write, I set the alarm on my phone to give me the nudge to start writing. When my phone went off, I would then start writing. That's all I did for a whole month. A habit built up every day. And it worked. It's still working. I'm writing this, aren't I?

The following month I added another alarm on my phone to do something else the next month and kept it going through the year. By the end of the year, I had built up some good habits that helped me through the day.

The problem many people face with new year resolutions is that they try to do too much at once. It's like trying to lift weights at the gym. You just can't bench press 100kg unless you've trained your body to get into the habit of being able to bench press 100kg. To achieve such a weight, you need to start with a smaller load and then gradually build up to the target weight.

Habits are the same.

You start small (ideally with one) and then build them up.

Tracking your habits is a great way to build them up. I've tried some habit tracking apps over the last year, but the one that works for me is Productive. It was the first habit tracking app that I tried, and nothing else I've tried has been as easy to use.

The good thing about tracking apps is that they give you a sense of success when you've reached a significant milestone like completing the habit for a week or even a month. Productive and other habit tracking apps have reminders built in as well, so it keeps all your habit building needs in the one place.

So, forget the new year resolutions and set yourself a short-term habit to achieve for the next few days. Once you've completed a few days with it, extend the practice for a few more days and keep at it. In no time you'll find that you've been able to get into your intended habit daily and by the end of a period of a few weeks it will become more of something that you just do.

For the last couple of years I've been writing every day through a practice called morning pages. It involves writing three pages of anything. Now, I know I'm not a writer. Not even close, but I use this practice to not just write anything, but to draft blog posts, collect thoughts and write up ideas. My morning pages became a time to write before I started doing any programming work.

The problem with this practice though is that very few of this writing will ever see the light of day. The original idea of writing your morning pages isn't to publish what you write. With a full day of work ahead though, I needed sometime in the day to some writing and I figured that using these three pages would be the best time to do this. As I finished each set of pages though, I would usually choose not publish anything from those pages. Not exactly a productive habit and so I decided I need to change my morning pages practice.

For a start I'm returning to publishing a blog post every day. I did this a few years back on this blog. I published every weekday and left the weekend's free. The topics varied from day to day but I'm aiming to keep posts grouped around a theme each week.

To keep my posts consistent and in a good size for reading, I'm aiming to publish in the region of 500 words a day. Some days might be less, some days might be more. There's no strict rule to post length other than it needs to be around the 500 words in length.

Posts will be structured around a theme or topic each week. Now the posts themselves won't form a particular series or even follow on from one another, but what they will have in common is that they will all relate to a single topic. Doing this allows me to plan posts ahead and structure what I need to write about everyday.

This little habit is called my morning stories. A chance to spend some time writing and get myself into a better habit of not just writing, but publishing what I write as well.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates on my blogging habits and where you can find me. Now is as good a time as any to update these.

Here’s the short version for those who just want the links.

• Blog posts (longer and less frequent)
• Micro posts (shorter and more frequent)
• Programming posts (longer and less frequent)

Here’s the extended version if you’re interested.

Main blog

This blog continues to run but will focus solely on long-form posts now. It will also remain my central site where people can find me and get in touch.

There have been many changes over the years on this blog. I started doing smaller micro-posts a while back, but lately, I felt that perhaps this blog was not the right place for these posts. More on where you can find the new home for these posts later.

This blog will now only feature daily posts that sit around the 500-word mark and will become more of a regular logging blog. Expect posts on the topics of bootstrapping products, productivity, writing and a few other minor topics. The goal isn’t to be a blog only on a single subject, but instead, focus on topics that I enjoy writing about and am interested in. A public journal might be the aptest description for the blog now.

Microblog

Last year I started using another blog for shorter posts. I mostly use it for links, quotes, thoughts and the like.

I’m using a new blogging platform for this called Micro.blog. It’s a micro-blogging platform that allows you to not only easily run your own blog, but also has timelines where you can follow other Micro-bloggers and converse with them using replies, much like Twitter does.

As painful as Twitter is with it’s muddled timelines, I do still find it of some value. Micro.blog allows me to syndicate my content to Twitter without the added pain of having to post the content myself or get sucked into continually checking my timeline.

Another great feature of Micro.blog is that it posts your whole post as a tweet if it fits within Twitter’s 280 character limit. Otherwise it will post a link to your blog post on Twitter. You get the best of both worlds.

I’ll continue to post to my micro-blog at least a few times a day over the course of 2018.

Programming blog

My programming blog is seeing some changes over the next few weeks. The focus is on more content and I’m gradually getting there.

The DigitalBothy blog was largely ignored last year, but I’ve got plans for groups of content over the next six months and I’ve got a few posts lined up already for January. With a bit of work I hope to keep a head of my scheduled posts on this by a couple of months to give myself some breathing space.

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So there you have it. A complete RSS update for all my digital homes on the Internet. Subscribe to whatever takes your fancy.

Another week closer to Christmas, another week of school and club activities for the boys.

We started off on Monday with the primary school nativity. Drew as always took it all in his stride and put in a very casual but confident performance as a shepherd. Monday night was the final RGU coaching session for 2017. Just a fun night for the boys really as they tried out different types of shots.

It looks like the season is over for the Packers tonight. It was a big ask for Rogers to come back and take the Packers to a victory over the Panthers, and for a while it looked like it was possible. Sadly though, it just didn’t go in the Packers favour. Just need to wait for next season now and enjoy the remainder of the season and the playoffs.

The highlight of the week though was seeing The Last Jedi on Friday night. A great follow-up to The Force Awakens.

• The web we may have lost – Medium - Net neutrality is all but lost. I was really disappointed with the result of the vote but then there’s no competing with the vast sums of money corporate America is paying out to get this changes through. Yes, it’s effectively a bribe.
• BuJoPro: Thoughts on Adapting Bullet Journal to a Hyper-Connected World - Study Hacks - Cal Newport - A few ideas from Cal Newport on making bullet journaling more effective with digital tools.
• Netflix is bringing The Punisher back for a second season - The Verge - Great news. I really enjoyed this.
  Are you still using an RSS reader? - The Verge Yes, I’m still using an RSS reader. It’s the only sane way of following anything on the Internet.
• If you see something, do something – Rhoneisms - A reminder that actions speak louder than words.
• Why Horizon Zero Dawn is my game of the year - The Verge - Horizon was a great game and my favourite of the year.
• Firefox is on a slippery slope - Mozilla certainly didn’t win any fans with this little marketing stunt.
• Nice Threads - Twitter seems to be in a continual state of change these days. It sometimes feels like it’s harder to keep up with Twitter itself than my own timeline.
• The iMac Pro is a beast, but it's not for everybody - The Verge - Apple released their iMac Pro this week and with a hefty price tag on it too. Not necessary for my line of work. I just don’t need this amount of computing power for writing code.