8 months in: Lessons learned on agile, data, and writing
October 2024 progress vs. my STELLAR roadmap goals for writing here on Substack: recap on new interview series, voiceover downloads, new lessons learned, actions, and plan for November
I committed in March to doing (and sharing) a retrospective each month on how I’m doing vs. my “STELLAR” goals. Here’s what I’ve learned in my 8th full month on Substack, and what I’ll do differently in November.
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Some acronyms I use:
AAaB = my Agile Analytics and Beyond newsletter
AI6P = my 6 ‘P’s in AI Pods newsletter
RF = Readability Formulas tool
WIP = Work In Progress
How It’s Going
In retrospective #7, I set goals for October. Here’s a look at how I did on each element of the STELLAR framework (other than ST, the starting position, which isn’t changing).
TL;DR version: I hit my target goal ranges for October posts, but did not exceed them as I often have. This was mostly due to dilution of my available time by an urgent health event affecting a close family member. That event is not over, and we have a long public holiday, so I’m scaling back my November goals. My data suggests that the audio voiceovers are being used, and the LinkedIn newsletters may not be worthwhile.
E - Progress towards End goal
Quantity and Length Goals
Table 1 summarizes how my results map to my quantity goal ranges in October. Archive links are below in the References1.
Articles: Not counting a guest post by Laura Wilde, PhD., I published
6 posts (including my “Behind The Substack” interview with ), plus
9 interviews (5 audio, 4 text). My backlog of completed interviews shrunk during October from 7 to 4.
Social media posts: Total new Notes and restacks with comments stayed about the same in as September, still above my target range max (32).
As of the month 7 retro, I had written and logged 108 posts and 121,867 words (as counted by MS Word and RF). During October, I added 14 more posts, of which I’m measuring 6, and 7,933 words. New total for month 8: 114 measured posts and 129,800 words.
Post Sizes and Distribution Details:
I stayed on track with my 50-50 balance of short and long posts (0 VeryShort + 3 Short, 2 Medium + 1 Long). My average post length stayed about the same as September (1322 vs. 1311).
Figure 2 shows my post size distributions through October.
Quality Goals
During October, I estimate that I stayed at quality level 6. Post size distribution has stabilized around my 50/50 target, and reading ease metrics are fairly steady.
LL - Lessons and Limits
My main lesson for the past few months has been on executing AISW interviews. Limiting myself to 1 audio interview per week helped, but with my October time constraints, it wasn’t enough. The “hybrid” interviews (recorded in audio, published in text) take less time, but still quite a bit.
I concluded this month that I need to slow down the interviewing pace, at least until my family member’s health event is resolved. Once it’s resolved, I’ll likely stay at the slower pace so it’s sustainable for the longer term. I’m now aiming for max 1 interview per week, regardless of format. That will also ease my workload for creating the LinkedIn newsletter editions.
A - Actions
Here are updates on my previous self-assigned actions.
(A9) April-June Lesson 1: Voiceovers
I added cloth curtains to improve the acoustics in my new office. It helped, but wasn’t enough. I also experimented with 4 different types of microphones and headsets. Surprisingly, the best sound quality seems to come from using my old iPhone headphones with the 3.5mm jack plugged into my Surface Pro. They pick up less room echo than my Yeti mic or my Logitech USB headset. So I’ll be using those headphones for my next interviews.
Beyond that, here’s where I stand on this action as of October:
A9-1 Planning and executing audio voiceovers
In October, I again didn’t publish any voiceovers, other than the AI6P AISW audio interviews. Once I’ve improved my acoustics, I may resume recording voiceovers on my new non-interview posts.
A9-2 RSS troubleshooting
All of the interview posts are going into a separate ‘People’ RSS file, not the main one. So none of my September and October AISW interview posts are externally synched. I opened a new support ticket on that, but there’s still no progress from Substack tech support on a fix. For now, I’ve abandoned the external syncs for the interviews, and I’m only using the internal podcast option.
(A12) June-September Lesson: Becoming a better writer - content planning
I had self-assigned action (A12) in my July retrospective on planning my content. For August, I made 3 changes to my AI6P content plan for this action, and kept it during September.
A12-1 AISW (“AI, Software, and Wetware”) interviews
The AISW interviews remain my top priority. Growth has slowed on the LinkedIn newsletter for AISW (537 subscribers). I’m experimenting with ways to reduce the effort for creating its content.
A12-2 AI Fundamentals section
I did create one post on AI Fundamentals in October (“The AI Iceberg”) in support of my background work on AI books. My second article on “What Is AI?” remains in draft, and I started on a part 2 of “But I don’t use AI”.
A12-3 Ethics of generative AI for music
The work on PART 3 of ethics of generative AI for music and the WIP company profiles remain on hold.
(A13) Voiceover usage visibility
In my July retro, I had self-assigned this action to help me figure out if or how I can get visibility into whether people are listening to the audio voiceover tracks. Using the new ‘Audio’ post format for interviews in October has given me some insights. The stats for the first Audio post I published, ’s interview on Oct. 3, shows 126 views and 62 podcast downloads - nearly 50%.
If those stats are accurate and hold up, then the audio voiceovers definitely seem to be worth doing. For now, I will continue to publish 1 audio interview per week. However, I’m not going to plan other audio posts or set specific audio targets.
(A14) Improve my audio production proficiency
I’m looking forward to a mentoring call with in early November on using Audacity more efficiently!
R - Review (Retrospective)
I committed to doing a monthly review at the end of October to see where I stand on my goals and actions - status: this article is it 😊
In addition to the analyses above on E, progress towards end goal, I looked at the post stats to explore if the LinkedIn AISW newsletter I started on Aug. 1 is worth the effort. The data indicates that very little traffic is coming in from LinkedIn for the audio or text posts. For the 9 AISW interview posts in October:
83.7% of traffic comes directly from email,
9.4% came from the Substack app,
only 2.9% came from LinkedIn.
On posts with a lower email percentage, the delta is in the Substack app and ‘direct’ clicks, not LinkedIn - for example, from the Oct. 7 interview post:
There are at least 3 possible reasons for the LinkedIn traffic stats to be so low:
No one is reading the LinkedIn newsletter and clicking through.
The way Substack counts LinkedIn click-throughs isn’t accurate.
Almost everyone who sees my LinkedIn newsletter is subscribing to the Substack newsletter, and then views the posts directly in Substack after that. (I question the likelihood of this, though. I’ve seen only a small bump in Substack subscribers with names I recognize as subscribers to the LinkedIn newsletter.)
I know that has been encouraging use of LinkedIn newsletters to drive traffic to Substack. I’m not sure what, if anything, to conclude from this data about whether it’s working for me, though. I don’t trust this data yet. I’m leaning towards reason #2 as being the most likely.
Bottom line:
The AI6P AISW interview series kickoff has been both a great success and a heavy time load. The lower-priority AI for Music series has stalled, and I’ve made no recent progress on my AI books. I also want to spend some of my writing time this month drafting a formal book proposal for my WIP AI books. (Thank you to for her support and encouragement on this 😊)
Unexpected family events consumed some of my time in October. I only made my October goals thanks to having some previously completed interviews in the queue. In November, my working time will be reduced by continuing to deal with this matter, plus we have the US Thanksgiving holiday. So my November targets need to go down a bit.
Four AISW interviews for November are already done or in final editing. This should be enough of a buffer to let me avoid any visible gaps while I handle my family’s needs and resume my AI book writing work. But I’m going to cut back to publishing one interview post per week.
New Actions from this October 2024 retro
Aside from adding the AI book proposal to my content plan, I’m not assigning myself any new actions this month.
New Targets for October 2024 (month 8)
I’m lowering my November goals to 7-10 total posts, including 5-6 interviews and this 1 retro post. That only allows 1-3 non-interview articles this month, counting the book proposal, which will take priority over new posts.
Scaling back the interviews to one per week should free up some time for my AI books and the AI for Music series. I’ll be reassessing the content plan for the AI for Music series this month.
Taking the US Thanksgiving holiday into account, my effort budget for 3 weeks of November will remain at 6-8 hours/day or 30-40 hours/week. Interviews are likely to keep my effort bursty.
What’s Next?
That’s my writing retro for October. I commit to doing another one after the end of November. I will re-evaluate my targets and plan then. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this!
“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” (Confucius)
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References
Archives analyzed in this retrospective
It really depends on the reach of your LinkedIn posts, I think for most Newsletters operators who do this well, that's the critical factor. Having LinkedIn Premium seems to also be a pre-req for that. Experimenting with different types of LinkedIn posts in a methodical way and constantly improving is the key. Always writing in a defied niche to your target person is helpful.
LinkedIn overvalues things like (education) and (experience) in the domain of your niche. It also will boost younger professionals.