Website changes

Squarespace launched a massively improved version at the beginning of the week, so I am going to be taking advantage of the new facilities to experiment with some changes to the website. So please don’t be surprised if the appearance and layout changes backwards and forwards for a bit.

I’ve turned off comments on this entry because it will be difficult to tell which temporary version any comments refer to. However when I’ve got something like a stable version I will post again and ask for comments.

Delays

There’s a slight delay in publishing the new seminar schedule and this week’s newsletter which it was supposed to be in. This is due to the fact that my back has decided to give out and any movement at the moment is agony!

Hopefully in a few day’s time I will be fully recovered.

Layout and Advertisements

I’ve come to the conclusion that the amount of income generated by the ads on this site is hardly worth the effort of inserting them. So over the next few days I will be removing all advertisements on this site, apart from those for my own books, and returning the layout of the blog to multiple postings on the page.

Site Changes

If you are a regular visitor to this site, you will have noticed that it has gone back to one blog posting per page and that the advertisements have reappeared. I am currently experimenting with various layouts to see whether advertisements on the site are worthwhile (my initial impression is that they are not). So I’d ask you to put up with the changes for a little bit longer.

Blog Comments and the Discussion Group

I thought I’d just draw your attention to one of the features of this website, which is that it is extremely interactive.

There are two basic ways in which you can contribute. One is by making a comment on a Blog entry, and the other is by joining in on the Discussion Forum. No form of registration is required for either, and you do not have to leave your email address or website details (though you can if you want to). You can either use your real name or a pseudonym. I’ve never yet had to remove an objectionable posting, which is a tribute to the readers of this website, but obviously I reserve the right to. What I have had to do is remove extended quotations of copyright material which go beyond the “fair use” criteria. So please watch this.

Comments on Blog Entries

Feel free to comment on any blog entry, however old. The button for doing so is at the top of the entry. All new comments are automatically drawn to my attention, so you can be sure I will read yours and will reply to it if I feel a reply is required. There is also an RSS Feed for blog comments, so the subscribers will be aware of your comment as well.

Discussion Forum

Also feel free to join in any discussion or to start a new one. Again I see all new contributions automatically and will reply if I feel a reply is required. Whenever a new posting is added to a discussion subject, however old, that subject is moved to the top of the list of subjects so your posting will be seen by other people.

Blogroll

I’ve started a Blogroll of useful blogs for time management and personal organisation. You’ll find it at the bottom of the left-hand margin. I’ve only got a few entries on it at the moment but will be adding more as I go along.

If you have a blog relevant to the subject and would like me to consider it for inclusion, please let me have the details by email ( mf@markforster.net ).

Google Page Ranking

I’m delighted to see that this blog has been promoted back up to a Google page ranking of 5, having been a 4 for most of the last year.

Google’s PageRank assigns each website on the internet a number between 1 and 10, representing a relative importance factor (in the eyes of Google). This number is determined by the number of credible links to your site that Google can identify. The higher your site’s PageRank is, the more precedence your site is given within search queries on terms that your site references — it’s your credibility rating with Google. Most sites on the internet have a PageRank 0. It becomes exponentially harder to move up in PageRank as the numbers increase. For example, there are only around 25 or so websites with PageRank 10.

According to the Google Backlink facility, there are around 235 sites linking to this blog.

Articles

I’m introducing a new category “Articles” which is intended for visitors to the site who don’t want to have to wade through a mass of small blog entries, but would like to be able to access major postings easily.

It would be too much of an effort to make it retrospective, but I’ve added the category to the two most recent articles so you can see how it works.

You can access it by going to Latest Articles in the Navigation section of the sidebar.

Most Popular Articles

I have just updated the list of Most Popular Articles in the left margin.

In are:

Diigo - A really useful program

I’ll just get the file out

To Do lists - how we hate them

Out are:

New technology

What don’t I want?

Structuring the day

What this website contains

It’s too early to assess the results of the request I sent out yesterday about the future of my newsletter, but one fact is coming out very clearly - most people have very little idea of what is available on this website.

There are over 200 articles on every aspect of time management, personal organisation and achieving goals. The website acts as an archive for every article I’ve written which still has some currency.

How can you access this information?

If you’re looking for a specific article or subject, then use the Search Box at the top of the left margin. This is fast, accurate and completely up-to-date (if you don’t believe me then try searching for any word that appears in this posting). You can search by category if you want to narrow it down further.

However the key to the articles is the Blog Archive link in the Navigation section in the left margin. This gives all the entries by Category, by Title, by Week and by Month.

Also in the left margin you will find links to the Most Popular Articles.

Happy browsing!

Future of the Newsletter

I’m gathing people’s views at the moment about what the future of my newsletter should be. Your input would be invaluable.

Please read the alternatives and comment on my discussion forum. So that all the comments end up in the same place, I have turned Comments off on this post.

Writing Blog Entries

Something that I have remarked on often in my books is that when one puts one’s attention on a subject it begins to change. This phenomenon is actually at the root of the “Current Initiative” idea in Do It Tomorrow, where the idea is to give a particular subject a daily burst of attention. Projects and the like resemble houseplants. Ideally they should be watered every day. If you miss a day or so, it won’t matter too much, but anything more than that and they will begin to wither and die.

So I was interested to see that the second that I decided to get writing on my blog again I got an idea which had never occurred to me before.

What I’ve done in the past is collect ideas for articles in one place. I usually keep a list of possible titles on Evernote. Then when I am ready to write an article, I select an idea and start drafting it in Notepad. (I use Notepad because, unlike Word, it doesn’t produce any formatting problems when uploaded). Once I have finished the drafting and editing, I upload the article to Squarespace.

Now the chief characteristic of this process is that there are innumerable opportunities for the articles to get lost. And that is exactly what has tended to happen.

And then I had a blinding flash of the obvious. All I had to do was every time I got an idea for an article or posting, however unformed or incoherent, was to start a new entry on the blog and leave it unpublished. That means that all the ideas are in one place, I can have a number of articles in draft at any one time, and none of them are going to get lost.

Now, as I say, this is a blinding flash of the obvious and is probably the way every blogger other than myself has worked since the beginning of recorded time - but it’s not the way I’ve been working. In fact it’s an excellent example of the way improving a system can make life much easier - a subject which I deal with at some length in Do It Tomorrow.

Once one has improved a system, the next question to ask is “How can this be applied elsewhere?” As soon as I ask the question the answer is obvious: I can use exactly the same system of unpublished drafts on ConstantContact for my newsletter.

Related article: Expand Your Ideas the Easy Way!

Getting Going Again

I have been conscious for a while that I have been neglecting this blog and my newsletter, and one of my New Year resolutions has been to get back into full-scale production.

The main reason I have not been writing very much over the past year has been that I have spent most of that year experimenting with some new methods of time management. Unfortunately they haven’t worked very well!

I’ve always seen myself as someone whose main calling is to experiment, rather than to find one answer which I then write about for evermore. The problem with experimenting is that by its very nature more experiments go wrong than go right. But one of life’s lessons is that it’s only by being willing to be wrong that you can discover the right answers.

Towards the end of last year I was beginning to feel that I really am making some positive progress. You will probably be able to judge by the quantity and quality of postings on this blog over the next few months whether the new ideas are actually working, or whether it will have to be back to the drawing board again.

So watch this space!

Changing back to multi-articles

As I’ve decided to remove most of the advertisements from the site, it is now easier to go back to having multiple blog entries on the page. I much prefer that layout, but it made it difficult for the Google Adwords editor to allocate relevant ads to the page.

Should you want to send a friend a link to a specific article, you can either use the “Email” link at the top of each article, or you can click the heading of the article which will have the effect of putting it on its own page with its own permanent link.