94% voted for...
Your feedback and ideas were invaluable — thank you
TLDR: keep it weekly, more practical tips, length ✅, polls ✅.
Word count: 580
Read time: 3 mins
Thank you for the hundreds of votes and many excellent ideas from last week. Let’s go through them, one question at a time…
Your preferred cadence is weekly (current frequency). I was thinking about moving to a fortnightly or monthly cadence. But given your feedback and the fact that the week-view is, IMO, the most useful and natural calendar view, it makes sense to keep the frequency as it is.
I’ll confess that it wasn’t obvious how to come up with these categories. But my main takeaway from the answers is that people would like to see practical timeboxing methods more than I knew. So you shall get them (poll on this below)...
575 words is right in the Goldilocks zone, apparently. There are almost exactly that number in this post.
The problem with individual email replies (though I encourage, welcome and enjoy them) is that no one else gets to see them. Of course, sometimes, the exchange should stay private. But other times a public airing is better for all.
The problem with Substack comments is that most people don’t use the platform so, again, there’s a limit to viewership.
I (now) know Substack polls are easy to set up, and liked by plenty of you, so I’ll do more of them to meet your preference. Someone said in an email reply (one you now all get to see!): ‘never be afraid to ask your community directly for help - people are here for the ideas, and because they want to help you be successful with it. It’s not a thing you can only ask once!’ (thanks Julian, I’m taking that to heart). I suspect I will ask something via a poll most weeks from hereon in. The functionality is very basic (eg there’s a limit of five answer choices) but it’s good enough.
I should have added another option: LinkedIn. Whether they like it or not, the world’s billion knowledge workers are on LinkedIn (a billion people from 200 territories). So it’s a good place to host further discussion (on a weekly post which corresponds to the newsletter, for example). And through my day job running filtered.com, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn anyway. Yes, I will try that too. In fact, this week here’s a link about this very post. If you’d like to add a perspective, disagree, or interact, please do — and I’ll keep an eye on it this and every week.
People suggested many ideas by way of email replies. My favourite is to add a Word-count and Read-time at the start of each post, just as I do at the beginning of each chapter of the book, which demonstrates how quick and easy it is to start reading, if you just do it. An hour before I went on air with Chris Evans on Virgin Radio earlier this year, I was listening to his breakfast show. He mentioned the interview with me that was coming up and enthusiastically brought up the book’s word-count/read-time feature, asking ‘Why don’t more books do that?’ Perhaps now, more will…
Next week I will include a practical tip about timeboxing. Help me choose a good one:
Marc
