Hey guys, I’m back after one week just like I promised. First, let’s look at the damage:

Day: time spent spinning, articles completed this week/month/all time

Mon: 1:00, 0/0/?

Tue: 1:20, 0/0/?

Wed: 0:20, 0/0/?

Thu: 0:50, 1/1/?

Fri: 0:00

Sat: 0:00

It looks bad, and I’ll be the first to say I’m not all that happy with this week, but it’s not as bas as it looks. Friday and Saturday I was at our biggest basketball tournament of the year, and I was prepared not to work if it distracted me from focusing, which on Friday it would have. My brother who has been in Iraq for six months surprised me by showing up at the tournament as well. I figured time spent with him and family was a teensy bit more important than squeeking out twenty minutes of spinning, but I could have done it after he went to bed. I think I was just making excuses since I was so tired. Anyhow, I did enjoy his visit, and I get to see him again on Wednesay.

I loathed almost every minute I spent spinning articles, but I have an idea to try this week. I thought I might be able to spin for hours on end if I really pushed myself, but I would reallllly have to push. Instead, I think I’m going to break it up into paragraph-sized chunks this week. Three or four sentences and then take a break. That should be pretty managable. I’m sticking with the 20 minutes a day, six days a week goal, and I will do it this time. Three articles a week seems pretty lofty right now, but I still think I can manage it. If nothing else, it’s something to shoot for by the end of the month.

Next week I will try to scan my calendar for you (and for myself).

Hello everyone, and thanks for checking out my blog. I’m not quite sure where it will go eventually, but right now, I’d like to write about something that is giving me trouble, and that’s working on my website. It’s not that I don’t work on it. I do. It’s that I don’t work on it on a consistent basis. That makes me unemployed with a hobby, not self-employed. I’ve tried lots of things to motivate myself. A couple have worked. A ton haven’t, and that’s fine. I’m not knocking trying something new out, but it does get discouraging when a vast majority of what you try doesn’t work. This blog is a spin off of something that has worked in the past and is currently working for another goal: charting my progress with a calendar. Right now my roommate and I are working out pretty regularly, and it’s very inspiring to look over and see days filled with activity and success. I even asked mom to make me more calendars since this works so well. Thanks mom.

Right now, I’m doing something that no one in their right mind wants to do, and that’s spinning articles. Basically, it’s rewriting articles I’ve already written in order to ultimately make my site more popular and get more people to visit it. It’s tedious, slow, and gut-wrenching, and I have to get it done if I’m ever going to make any money off this website. It feels like I have such a long way to go, so instead of working towards my first sale, I’ll be working towards getting traffic and completing the course I purchased. Right now, getting traffic means spinning articles and submitting them to article directories.

So, for the month of February, I want to put out three spun articles a week, and I want to work on them for at least twenty minutes a day, six days a week. That’s not too ambitious, but it’s not too lazy in my opinion either. I was initially tempted to add more goals, but I’m trying to model my workout success. Zack and I have agreed that all we have to do is go to the gym and work out for fifteen minutes. If one of us says let’s go to the gym, the other has to, or it costs him $20. Simple. No complicated workout routines. No trying to optimize for peak fitness. Just go in every day and do something. If you look at each of our calendars, there are only a couple days where we did the 15 minute minimum which pretty much means that if we can haul our asses to the gym, we can count on ourselves to get a good workout. Getting back to my website goal, twenty minutes a day isn’t going to get me anywhere close to spinning three articles a week. The twenty minutes is more of a “keep in the habit” for a bad day when that bad day arrives.

I’m going to give this a try for the month of February and see how it goes. I’m also going to update this blog weekly for this month at least. Lucky you I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and I hope to see you next week!

I’d like to give acknowlegement to
Steve Pavlina for the idea of a 30 day trial
cterao from affilorama for his blog
Rich Dad Poor Dad for the acronym F.O.C.U.S. (Follow One Course Until Successful)