I am sharing with you the steps in the process of rethinking the blog.  You may not find very interesting reading what changes I decide to make to my goal, audience and content in my blog. But you can see how to set up a thinking framework and a process to do that.

In this first step it's time to look at the data. Search for it and gather it all together to better see the patterns.

I almost started this post with the words "Today I have been..." and then I realized I am doing it again. I said it in yesterday's post: one of my goals in evolving the blog is to write and publish at a better time of the day. But here I am, just before going to bed, writing the post. So I have written down the things I was going to talk that I have been doing today and I will use them in another moment.

I need to fine tune my habit because I want to keep it until I decide If I don't really need it.

I have been dissecting the situation with the help of my girlfriend/fiancé to find different fronts where I want to take action to improve and keep moving forward. Today we have managed to define at least three courses of action for what seemed a tangled and unique situation, formerly known as "what I do". I think thats three areas are mostly everything, but I cannot be sure yet until I finish making all the questions to see the situation from all the possible angles.

As I was talking in yesterday's post Turning point. The goal of this blog has been accomplished. I have managed to build the habit. But there are some things that the blog needs in order to keep being useful:

• A new goal, to be defined with questions such as: What I have learn until now thanks to the blog? How will I use this new habit to work towards my vision?
• Change the time when I usually write and publish the posts. Which is usually at the end of the day because I either don't manage my time better or because I have get used to talk about what I have done during that day and so, it seems logical to make it at the end of the day.
• Work in batches and have a reserve of posts. In case I keep posting daily , which I feel is something I want to keep doing.

That is, to start working more seriously on a project that can be useful and profitable. Since making an income to live from blogging is not my first choice, I have put to rest some plans to market and promote the blog (because I have a small audience) until I define if the new goal of the blog really needs it.

Separating the search of an income stream from the blog is important since I have been slowly believing that I need more readers to be able to turn the blog into a source of income.

I have around 7 projects or topics which I have been talking about in the blog, plus 2 more which I haven't, that are candidates to be explored to help someone needs.

I need to make better use of my time, specially when doing personal, everyday house chores. Because I am at home most of the day, the everyday tasks such as cooking, cleaning and so on, tend to be around me always and they define my daily schedule more than I have wanted to admit until now.
Because of my inabilty to manage "house chores time" I am also having problems on how to use my "productive time" efficiently. So I am going to use the sames steps I would use to improve a creative or business process to improve the way I face the daily chores:

1. Track
2. Analysis
3. Test improvements
4. Evaluate and control

For example, one of the most time consuming chores is to decide what to cook according to our diet, what we have eaten recently and what ingredients I have available. I haven't succeded in preparing weekly meal plans. Which would be ver useful when doing the grocery list. What we usually use as a reference is what we have bought the last time (specially when buying online) instead of what we have consumed. So, from now on I will be tracking what things we consume each day, instead of trying to figure out what to eat the next week when doing the groceries. 
Another thing I have done is to prepare three check lists in a whiteboard with daily, weekly and monthly tasks for personal and house chores.

In the last days I have been asking myself some different questions to review my course of action on AlejoLab and the pursue of my vision. I have been posting everyday for more than two months, and now what? I have built the habit and it proved to be what I needed. Pulling me to develop my ideas, projects or experiments, not just keeping for myself but to share them publicly and explore how I present the things I do.

But now this habit can be useful beyond that. I never planned to have a big audience in this blog (and I don't have it actually). Since it was for me to get used to write publicly in the first place. But now I am also feeling the need of interacting with the people, as I find that I want to do something useful to others while enjoying it myself.

So, I will be facing these questions myself using some drawings, thinker toys, and other tools to help me review my vision on the role of AlejoLab in it. Expect some posts talking about this in the next days and meta-topics, such as the blog itself, goal setting, vision, business. Even when I don't plan to make these kind of topics of the lab. There are already enough generic business and marketing blogs out there!

ojass aspfia aos eer fy asome. iasd doantoas fjawuwnt oq wit anaytons sdo u a, just pretnefin fto frite it.
osme sdyas is har tod write anythogn and todaf si hsut ne tnss gsia. ua asmadwoifnginfs jsut sfjsfd dfjtnee ckenfuboad.
What do you think?

What you can see here is 2 different audio takes of the same speech. What I was doing was just reading an online article and then I played the previous track while recording it again. Its kind of funny, and strange, to see how some of the errors kept there, others were gone and some new appeared because my own voice was annoying me. It was sort of like watching someting evolving.

At the fith try I recorded without playing the previous try on the background. I think thats the better one, because after that I tried again speaking while hearing and it got slightly worse.

But you may be wondering why I was doing it that way if I wanted to improve the way I spoke. Listening to myself while speaking was annoying so how can that help me to do any better? Well, actually, there are really some useful things about speaking while you listen the previous take. First, I got to hear myself saying the same words in different ways a lot more times and in a way it was much funnier that just listening to myself. The second reason is that when you hear yourself there is a limit on the things you are able to remember to fix or improve for the next take, and that, anyways, takes memory, which is something I wasn't caring about.

But the actual reason because I started doing it that way is because I wanted the waveform to be syncronized, at least for a minimum, so I could compare them by hearing and looking at them together. Yes, that it, I was wondering if there would be something that I could see instead of hear. And sure there is something! Look:

The take above was the first one and the other below is the last. Just by looking at this I can see I was speaking much louder and a bit quicker. Quicker doesn't neccesarily means better, but I can still see the points where a sound ends and another starts, so I think it's not that bad to speak a bit faster.

The reason why I am trying to improve my english speaking now is because I plan to record some videos in the future and I don't feel quite comfortable on how do I sound. It's not just because of my spanish accent but also because I tend to loose focus on the pronuciation and forgot to keep articulating correctly, mixing the words as I would do speaking my native language.

And I plan to record some videos because I have been waiting (procrastinating?) to use videos to go further on my journey about monetizing my unfocused creativity in which I feel videos and speaking correctly are going to play an important role.

Yesterday was the last day of the third 21-day step toward building my habit that will help me go toward my vision. These steps are actually:

1. Publish something everyday (It went from 1 May to 21 May)
   
2. interesting ( I also reviewed my second 21 days)
3. that involves my creativity or my creations (This is ending today)
4. helping me to make a life out of it (this is what I need to figure out from now on)

So what happens on the 23rd of July (21 days from now)? Will my habit be completely built the way I want? You know what... I think I don't really care. I am getting more comfortable each day doing this and for me is a good thing having this habit to built forward momentum and avoiding me to drift away from my vision. So I will just evaluate that when the day comes. But, as I said, I feel that for this next step I am going to be using the spoken word for it to really start rolling.

Today I have been working a lot on the wedding site, some guests are already registering and not everything is done yet. I have been tinkering with plugins and code tweaks. And researching about different options to get the things done.

I am also wondering what to do with this site, if I could try to set up a wordpress installation and start the migration now that I have the momentum and the skills are sharping again.

Post for today, 24 June 2013

I am having problems with sites in the same server, domains, DNS and A records. So this is going to be my temporal solution until I fix everything while keeping sane. I have to fix other things first, but this doesn't need to stop my goal of publishing a post each day.

Whish me luck!

You can still visit the site and the other blog posts of AlejoLab

Last Friday I posted my first mini-product for sale a writers tracking spreadsheet to help improve productivity when writing. Apparently my mind thought all the work poured there surely deserved missing the post on the following day. Yep, that's the second day I miss the daily post. I was the whole Saturday working (or fighting) to develop the web for my upcoming wedding and at the end of the day I just wanted to go to bed and keep my reading of A storm of swords.

Today I had another session to work on the Oppa! video project, but the weather was so awful that we ended in a cafeteria and nothing worthy to be speak of was made. Because of the way the project is this was expected to happen anytime. I wonder why do I want to make a project that relies so much in the weather if I am in the UK.

I have also been writing, and using my brand new and cool tracking spreadsheet for the first time. I wrote 1583 words in two sessions, with an overall speed of 590 words per hour. I was working on character notes and synopses. I don't have enough data yet to draw conclusions, but it seems that I can spot a pattern appearing. My speed is a bit higher on my second session during the day. I will keep an eye on that since this is just a vague hypothesis, I don't even have proper data about long sessions or days in a row working.

See you tomorrow.

If I don't count the day I slipped, today it's 42 days since I started publishing everyday. That means going a step further.

Previously, at some point I reviewed my habit roadmap and came up with the following steps:

1. Publish something everyday
   
2. interesting
3. that involves my creativity or my creations
4. that will help me
5. on my projects
6. allowing me to make a life out of it

That means that at this point I am adding and focusing on the "that involves my creativity or my creations" step. I think that I am already doing this fairly often, almost everyday I would say. I guess when thinking what was interesting I naturally came up with things "involving my creativity or creations". Anyway, it gives me a little more time to get used to it and will allow me to focus more on the present step.

I feel tempted to go over this and focus directly on the next one, which leads me to a new review. I think that when working on the "that will help me" step it's going to feel like an abstract goal which will concretize into either "help on my projects" or "help to allow me male a life out of it". So I am thinking about changing the habit roadmap again to: