Progress Review – March 2008

By Joshua on April 04 2008

I made more progress toward my goals this month than last month, but still not quite as much as I would have liked. Here's how it breaks down.

March Goals

1. Review my goals and progress each Monday morning

I was successful in achieving this goal, and it was helpful in keeping me more on track. The one thing that I need to keep in mind for the future is that I need to weight my efforts more heavily toward accomplishing things at the beginning of the month so that the unexpected is less likely to derail my efforts.

While I will continue doing this, since achieving this goal was so easy, I won't make it part of next month's list.

2. Add 40 more RSS subscribers

I came within 2 or 3 subscribers of my goal by the end of the month. Most of the growth appears to have been due to participation in Design Float (a niche Digg-style site), and the fact that one of my posts there was picked up by CSS Globe (a great resource for web designers).

I also tried to write more value-packed content, which I believe helped, but is a bit less measurable.

3. Write 4 guest posts

I came up short on this goal again, though closer than last month. I wrote two complete guest posts, and I drafted the outlines of two more. Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling well on the last days of the month, when I had planned to finish writing them. (See my comments about goal 1.)

4. Obtain at least 2 guest posts

While I would like to obtain the occasional guest post, what I realized when reviewing this month is that they aren't necessarily any less work than writing a decent post myself. So I failed at this one, but also realized that I don't have much of a reason to pursue it as a goal either.

5. Get feedback on my free WordPress theme and incorporate any suggestions

About halfway through the month, I realized that I'm just not comfortable opening up this theme to the public yet. It needs significantly more work before it is ready for that. Goal canceled.

6. Write one chapter of my ebook

Goal accomplished. Actually, more than accomplished. I ended up writing two chapters of the ebook.

As I was writing, I realized that it could easily be expanded from a simple ebook to something more like an online course. And this would provide more value to the people that end up using it.

Analyzing March

The main thing that I learned in March is that I need to do a better job of thinking through my goals before committing to them. Questions that I'll try to ask myself in the future: "Will this actually bring me closer to my overall goals?" and "Is this something that I've done sufficient prep work for?"

April Goals

1. Add 50 more subscribers

Given that I was so close to last month's goal, I think this will be reasonable. But since I probably won't be able to count on as many subscribers coming from Design Float now, I'll have to figure out other ways to raise my blog's visibility.

2. Write 4 (or 6?) guest posts

Ideally, I would like to write four totally new guest posts and complete the two which I've started, but that is a "stretch" goal, and I'll be quite happy to write just four this month.

3. Further investigate my course idea, and if it seems feasible, create content for two sections.

On the other hand, if it doesn't seem feasible, I will just write two more chapters of my ebook.

Your thoughts

What about you? Do you have monthly goals? Care to share them? What do you do to stay on track?