This is the second in a series of monthly reports detailing the revenue and expenses from my blogging business over time.
In the last report, I covered the first six months of blogging in which period I had $46.78 (CAD) of expenses with no revenue. I also covered my early content generation strategies like three-minute paper summaries, free tools and resources that I used, and my traffic and social media growth in that period.
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January 2017 Summary
As I mentioned in the previous report, a hard drive on content generation with over 50 posts in the first few months left me pretty burnt out on writing at the start of 2017. With hosting already covered for a year, my only expense in January was a $4.99 recurring charge for a service called Boomerang for Gmail.
I purchased boomerang after reading Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity by David Allen and realizing that I needed a system for organizing my blogging and online life.
“Getting Things Done” With Boomerang
From whiteboards to post-it notes, I have always been a productivity junky. However, with the stress of keeping my PhD research rolling, keeping up with blog posting, and general life stuff, I was struggling to find my groove at the start of 2017.
In his book, David Allen outlined his “Getting Things Done” strategy which involves capturing all your thoughts in an external spot, clarifying them, organizing them and taking action on them.
For me, this “external spot” was a Gmail account I set up just for personal organization and boomerang was the tool that I used to help drive that system. Anytime I had an idea from a new blog post, to remember to take out the trash, I sent an email to this account.
Each morning I would bring this email account to “Inbox Zero” by moving the tasks to designated project folders or to-do lists, assigning due dates, or moving it forward to a later date.
Boomerang helped with this – I can forward the email to myself at a later time with a one button click from inside my Gmail account. They have a free “basic” version which allows you to forward up to 10 emails, but I quickly found myself wanting more and upgraded to the “personal” version. Using this program, I ultimately created my own “Getting Things Done” system, that I call “Capture, Sort, Do” – I will write a post about this later!
