My Year in Review

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

The year has come to an end. A lot went on for me. I’ve landed a job after college, worked seven jobs at once, helped run a professional fraternity of over 130 people, joined 9rules, left b5media, met new people, learned new things. It’s been fun.

Statistics

My site has shown significant improvement and growth. At the beginning of the year I was used to writing shorter posts — they weren’t the highest quality. As time went on I learned what worked best for the site and its readers. I started with 50 subscribers and am now around 250; some obvious growth.

Additionally, I’ve tracked my incoming traffic with Mint which has also shown constant growth. I’ve gone from 2,250 unique visitors each month to 4,500. With that said, 2006 brought me 32,950 unique visitors and 74,545 page views. Numbers that still amaze me.

As far as the site goes, last year I wrote 321 posts which received 689 comments. Certainly an accomplishment for my first year of blogging. In the year’s time I’ve served up some decent content which has also earned me first on Google when searching for ‘devin‘. I beat out the porn star, politician, and guy who owns devin.com. Man, I’m good…

Best of the Year

I’ve had a lot of people visit my site for different reasons. My top reason this year was to learn about the FIRO-B assessment. Unfortunately there were some issues with the way I presented their material so they kindly (C&D letter) asked me to take it all down.

The second biggest draw was for information about biphasic sleep. I’ve been maintaining this nap/sleep routine since January (I don’t nap much over break though) and I couldn’t be happier. It made for a great discussion during some interviews this year. Oh, and someone linked to me on Wikipedia — that was neat to see.

A lot of people also arrived here recently to learn about Miss Dewey, many other want to know about MySpace and why it’s so worthless. In any case, a lot of people have visited for a lot of different reasons and I’m glad my site has proved some worth to them.

Personal Improvement Plan

I started doing a few things this year to help myself get organized, get productive, and get all-around better. This including making todo lists (which turned into calendaring and scheduling), biphasic sleep, working out more and reading more.

I think I very well across all fields except the last. I haven’t read nearly as much as I had planned. In fact, I set aside a goal of a book every month. I think I read four new books this year. I intend to resolve that with a better plan. As far as other areas of improvement? I’m not sure what I want to do — I simply want to remedy my previous goal.

Future Plans

I hope to make a few changes to allow me to focus more. Here are the major areas of my life in the coming months and what I hope to do across all of them:

• Academics: I started to lose motivation at the end of the last semester because I had a lot going on, was working hard with little reward, and was already in the process of signing onto a job for next Fall. This semester I plan to bring my laptop to class and type diligent notes. I’ve realized that the art of typing/writing what you learn really helps solidify your understanding.
• Work: My current job presents me with lots to do but sometimes not a lot to learn. I will seek out new opportunities to gain new experiences. I also hope to keep doing some web projects on the side.
• AKPsi: I’m the VP of Membership meaning I run the rush/pledge programs. The goal is to have the majority of the semester planned right now (over break) so that I don’t consume too much time during school.
• DevinReams.com: My site is named after myself, I feel like I should talk a bit more about myself. I plan to do a ‘Week in Review’ every Friday to reflect and document how things are going. Some people may browse past it, others may find it interesting to get to know me a bit more. It will go a bit better than Mind Averse (daily video blog) did.
• Mind Averse: Instead of making a daily video blog I intend to turn this into a quasi-documentary as I explore the books I’m reading. I feel a lot more can be done with video and I hope this project (starting February) will take off.
• Colorado Snow Blog: As I start skiing more I hope to blog more about Colorado snow sports, resorts, etc. I’d also like to find some additional authors that would like to contribute.
• Life With Women: I enjoy making this comic strip and I hope to work on Fridays to create two new strips each month. So far the responses have been positive, I just need to learn to draw and be humorous.
• Yopos: This is no longer about young professionals unfortunately. The community wasn’t as strong as I had hoped. Instead it’s turned into a fun podcast that Noah and I work on. I intend to keep doing this every week.

Obviously I’ve got some plans. I’ve been writing down stuff as I think of it. Setting dates and deadlines. As Tyme has mentioned, you need to have some sort of plan. Sure, you can set lofty goals but you need to be able to measure your success. That’s certainly something I’ve learned this year. I’ve tried a bunch of things and realized what works, what I like, etc. Happy New Year!