Hellooo again
As the earth takes another revolution around the sun, I went through my journals of 2023. My achievements of the year.
You know, there werenāt any notable failures for the year. Why? Because I didnāt try anything new. Didnāt enter any uncharted territory. I did try (and fail) at being consistent with Instagram Reels creation, by the way.
Iām spending more time on myself, tinkeringā¦ just playing with bells and whistlesā¦ almost like in my pre-freelancing era. And I started moving away from freelancing.
My Book Blabber blog managed to see another year.
Published 70+ articles
Updated 80+ articles for SEO (images, links and keywords)
Read around 40 books
Tagged and organised my Goodreads books
Catalogued my physical books digitally
Started taking book review assignments
I even launched a merch store of bookish designs.
I havenāt tried multiple side projects, unlike in other years. And I even started saying No more and moreā¦ without feeling bad about it.
Sometimes, you need to love yourself, love your timeā¦ working on things you need to instead of trying to please everyone. Maybe Iām being better focused. Who knows.
I did publish my first book, too: Be a Product. That was the only other side project of 2023.
Quoting James Clear from his recent newsletter:
New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.
My secret to productivity is not to set a goal. I donāt thrive under the pressure of metrics.
For the past 2+ years, Iāve been maintaining daily to-do lists physically. Just the task, not how much or when. And somehow, things fall into place.
The newest task on my to-do is to publish on Book Blabber regularly. Publish one article daily.
As of writing this on Sunday, Jan 7, I have managed to publish five articles. I also have two blogging partners for accountability.
Anmol is publishing on his Bizlite blog, and Sandeep is publishing on QuickScream. Apart from the book blog, Iāve sorted a few topics for my merch store blog, too. Just in case I get bored with regularly writing about books, you know.
Used a combination of tools for the process:
ChatGPT for topic ideas
RankAtom for ideal keywords
NeuralText for other related keywords
Sorted the topics last year itself, in December. Now, I use ChatGPT to speed up my blog creation process. I also plan to use CopySpace (or Lex) later to create articles for my merch store blog.
Have also set up a bit of automatic distribution:
RSS to Pabbly: to post articles on Twitter/X
RSS to SendFox: to email articles to my blog subscribers
Had also set up LinkedIn sharing, but it felt like spamming everyone with links. Thus, removed.
So, my mantra for 2024 is to use automation and AI tools and be absolutely lazy at work.
Oh, I should also tell you about the bulk creation of Canva images.
I used the feature earlier to generate 250+ images in ten seconds. Remember my blogging marathon from last year? Mentioned it in this newsletter.
Published around 50 articles in 2 months. And I created a banner-kinda image for each of the 250+ books recommended laterā¦ in December (last month).
Did it as a part of regular SEO tweaks. Havenāt updated all those articles, though; just the best-ranking ones so farā¦ to improve their ranking.
Even collecting the Goodreads ratings of each book (for the images) was a breezy affair. Asked Bing to give me the ratings for each. And it gave accurate numbers. (I checked a few manually.)
Copied all details to a Google Sheet and uploaded it to Canva as a CSV file. The images of book covers I added manually, though.
Thatās how Iām saving a few minutes here and there.
So, 2023 was quite a successful year for my own projects.
Focused on just one side project.
Set up regular automation.
Did AI writing shamelessly.
Cut back into social interactions.
Started saying No more.
Oh, did I tell you I recently got myself a whiteboard?
As you can see, Iām using it as a reminder board to see the tasks I need to keep myself busy with. Have a few extras mentioned, which I can take up when feeling bored. Still, trying not to step into a hundred different boats.
Even though my merch store is yet to generate salesā¦ regular sales, being able to focus on just Book Blabber (apart from freelancing) was an impressive feat.
Plus, I managed to send one newsletter every week. One story every week. And I hope to continue doing this.
OK, thatās all for now.
And now todayās questionā¦ What is somethingā¦ one habit that you hope to build in 2024?
Bidding adieu. Enjoy your day. Live long and prosper.