I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Mostly because they assume a degree of certainty and predictability about the future that rarely plays out. But also, it seems like an arbitrary and infrequent time to review and reflect! Having said that, at the start of 2023, I did decide to make an intentional effort to blog more.
Reflections
In a review of 2022, I realised that I had only published 5 posts, and that was part of a longer trend. I wanted to get back into the habit of writing more. Therefore, I decided to make sure I scheduled 1-2 hours every week for writing. The idea was to try and get something publishable in that timebox. In general that proved to be successful. While it often took longer than that to make final edits and SEO updates, the timebox was enough of an enabling constraint to focus on getting a core idea out.
By the end of the year, I had published 23 posts – my most productive 12 months in 10 years! I’m aware that is a bit of a vanity metric, but I hope the quality was also good enough at least a few people found them useful! (My most productive year was 2009 with a massive 45 posts!). The strategy seems to have worked so while I still find it hard to get started, I need to keep going in 2024.
Top Posts Published in 2023
These are the top 5 posts I published last year. The #1 in particular struck a chord and was a runaway winner. I’m also surprised that #5 was so popular, but that’s the beauty of blogging regularly. You never know what will resonate and what will fall flat.
- The Only Useful Icebreaker Activity Anyone May Ever Need
- Strategy Deployment and Flight Levels
- Strategy Deployment and Estuarine Mapping
- The Evidence To Look For In A Successful Agile Transformation
- The Best Agile Accounting Approach To CapEx and OpEx
Top Posts Viewed in 2023
There are the top 10 posts overall last year, regardless of when they were published. It’s interesting to see the mix of newer posts from this year with much older posts from over 10 years ago. Having said that #3 will have been boosed by my recent presentations on the subject.
- The Only Useful Icebreaker Activity Anyone May Ever Need
- What is Backbriefing?
- Fidelity – The Lost Dimension of the Iron Triangle
- Strategy Deployment and Flight Levels
- Running the Ball Flow Game
- How to Measure the Predictability of Agile
- What is an X-Matrix?
- Portfolio Kanban
- Strategy Deployment and Estuarine Mapping
- Strategy Deployment, the X-Matrix and Kanban Thinking
There are also a couple of game pages which are still proving to be popular and would have been mixed into this top 10.
So that’s my review and reflection on 2023. It also makes the first post of 2024. That feels like a bit of a cheat, but the important thing for me was to get back into the rhythm and discipline as soon as possible. Hopefully next weeks the content will be more challenging!