Statboy Blog

Along with setting (but never reaching) traffic goals, the other great tradition of my blogging career is outlining how I work. This provides endless blogging fodder because it changes about twice a week.

Here is the current routine, which, candidly, I thought of fifteen minutes ago and haven’t tried for a single day yet:

1. I work in 25-minute intervals, with five-minute breaks between each. You see this called the “Pomodoro method” online.

2. At the beginning of each day, I write down the specific thing I want to accomplish in each stream of work: my side project, my day job, and my side project at my day job.

   (Quickly: Any half-decent employee has side projects at their day job. These are things the employee understands must be done, but their boss isn’t sufficiently aware—because the boss is focused elsewhere. If you don’t have side projects at your day job, it’s because a) you’re too lazy/disinterested, or b) all your effort requires direction from your boss. Either is undesirable, although understandable, in an employee.)

   For example, today my three goals look like this:

   • side project (Statboy): make chart component for counts by value
   • day job: finish cleaning up data for recently onboarded customer
   • day job side project: finish UI for managing user roles

3. Rotate through Pomodoro intervals focused on those three goals. Do one 25-minute interval on the side project, one on the day job, one on the day job side project, and repeat until the day is over.

And that’s it. To round things out, I spend two extra intervals reading (one in the morning, one in the evening).

On a good day, I get through 15 intervals, which equals about 2–2.5 hours focused on each area. That’s plenty of time to make progress on all three fronts.

As for handling interruptions: I ignore them and continue the cycle. For example, work meetings rarely fit cleanly into the Pomodoro schedule. I don’t make any attempt to correct for this. When the meeting ends, I resume the cycle by working on whichever topic I left off. It helps that meetings aren’t a large part of my job, and I avoid them whenever possible.

Two or three times a year, I start a blog with the goal that I'll write for an hour each morning, publish 500 words every day, or reach 100 daily uniques by some goalpost date. These efforts invariably fall off once work gets too busy, and blogging starts looking like the most obvious thing to cut from my schedule.

Despite that, here I am again, attempting a cold start to my blogging career. As ever, I begin with a (very brief) manifesto on blogging: It seems like the key to success on the internet, at least that's what I hear others say. It's possible that this advice is 15 years out of date—maybe today, the key to internet success is TikTok or Twitter. Maybe there are several working keys. In any case, I'm starting with blogging, since it's the best fit for my writing style (verbose, rambling), and blogs will still be limping along once the world has moved on from TikTok to whatever's next on the social media carousel.

Part of my first post tradition is setting some goals, and I hate to see a tradition fall by the wayside, so here goes:

• 250 words written (perhaps not published) daily for the duration of 2024. 250 is about the length of this post and is easily reachable in 25 minutes if you're willing to set aside all concerns about the quality of thought and prose.
• An average of 1000 daily uniques in December 2024.

The first actual post is now live.