What's New on Medium, Productivity Tips, and a Look at My Stats For June

Change is always exciting, and it always provides new opportunities

Hello Friends!

In July, my wife’s parents will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. That’s pretty remarkable when you stop and think about it. They live in Lima, Peru, so we’ll be heading down to visit them for a few weeks.

I’m excited about the trip. Frankly, I need the break from US politics. It’s good to know that you can go abroad and find places in the world with a greater commitment to sanity. Perhaps we won’t come back.

In preparation, I’ve been trying to get ahead with my writing. I hope that both my Medium and Substack followers won’t notice any change. However, it’s likely I won’t get as many articles done in July.

As I’ve been scrambling to fit two months worth of work into one, I stumbled across a productivity tip that I’d like to share with you in this article. I’ll also tell you about what Medium has in store in the near future, and give you a behind the scenes look at my statistics for June. Let’s get going!

When you’re too tired to write, sketch out your articles

I now have a folder on my desktop called “Upcoming articles.” This folder has 17 doc files containing outlines for articles in various stages of development. Some of them are just a few lines, others contain a few pages of a rough draft.

I created this folder by being more disciplined about going through my emails. Quite often during the day, I’ll pause what I’m doing and shoot off a bunch of notes to myself in the form of emails. Actually, I’ll do the same thing using the notes feature on Substack.

Over the last week, when fatigue sits in at the end of the workday, I’m making it my last task to go through my email and sort out my notes into documents. Then, when I have energy in the morning, I can open these docs and easily resume from where I left off the day before.

As I write this, I see that I’ll have to do the same thing with notes. There’s a lot of information to be harvested from the ideas you jot down, the response (likes and shares) you get to those articles, and the comments.

You should ask yourselves the following questions:

• What is it about this note that got such a response?

• Why do people like but not share this note?

• Why do people share this note but not respond?

• Why is this note attracting so many bot comments?

• Etc.

I’ve only been working off my emails, but I’ll have to go through and process my Substack notes as well. In the future, I think I’ll create Google Docs so I have access to these outlines and sketches no matter where I am (last year, I wrote a couple successful articles in airports).

The point of all of this that creative work takes a huge amount of energy, but “spring cleaning” is something you can do on auto-pilot. If you take a few minutes at the end of your workday to organize your thoughts into outlines, you set yourself up to be a lot more efficient when you sit down at your computer ready to start the next day.

Sometimes I don’t have the energy to open up a doc file, but I can write a whole article in the form of an email. It doesn’t make sense but it doesn’t have to. Don’t question it, just take advantage, get the work done, then go back to it when you’re well-rested.

My stats for June

Pretty good, 14/19 (Boosted stories) for 73.6%. However, I’m more interested in evaluating the 5 that weren’t Boosted than focusing on the 14 that were. When I got done, I sent an email to my friend

Alison Acheson

to ask her for some feedback on why those articles weren’t selected. Her response helped me to write my Boost Checklist.

I only went 1/4 on my articles for The Writing cooperative, which is a bit of a head scratcher. However, the one article that did get Boosted was my biggest earner for the month:

I make it a rule not to check my earnings as I go through the month. Creativity is not linear, so checking daily just creates needless stress.

There are times when I’ve gotten to the 15th of the month with only 5 “successful” stories, and then I might get 3 or 4 on the 16th. There’s not an even disbursement. The flip side of that is when you exceed your expectations in the first few days, you don’t think “Wow, I’m ahead of schedule!” instead you think, “Now I have to maintain this momentum until the end of the month.”

Then, when there’s an inevitable drawback, you’re disappointed again.

Take my advice and check your earnings once a month. That sampling allows for enough time so you can harvest reasonable data without creating unproductive panic.

My story stats for the month look like this:

Medium is constantly tinkering with their system. Over the last few months, my views have stayed consistent but my reads have gone down. I think that is just a consequence of how they’re counting reads. My earnings haven’t gone down, so it’s nothing to worry about.

It’s important not to freak out too much when you see things in stats you can’t immediately explain. There’s a lot of work being done on the backend that we don’t see. You can’t arrive at the “gloom and doom” conclusion that the stats predict your demise. They don’t. They’re just being collected differently.

Here’s May for the sake of comparison:

What’s next for Medium?

The second Medium Day is scheduled for August 17th, 2024. You can read more about it here.

It’s hard to believe a year has already gone by! I gave a talk last year, which was one of the first things I promoted in this newsletter. At the time I had only 52 subscribers:

Here’s today:

I’ve applied to give another talk, so fingers crossed that they accept me. I think it’s important for writers to take every opportunity to increase their visibility. I also feel that since Medium is so important to my writing strategy, it’s up to me to promote the platform as much as possible.

Writers can’t be passive about their careers. We have to always aggressively look for and take advantage of promotional opportunities. I look forward to giving you more updates and information about Medium Day (and other things) as it becomes available.

That’s it for today! As always, leave your comments below!

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