Daily Learning: 4 May 2020

I read two blog posts and watched two episodes of an online course today. I found Derek Sivers article of posting daily to be the most interesting piece of content I consumed today.

Google Analytics

I watched two episodes of the “Google Analytics for Beginners” course. One episode covered ways to share reports and the other episode covered creating dashboards and shortcuts/saved reports.

Share Reports

The options for sharing a report are located in the top-right corner of the report. There are three options:

“Save” creates a shortcut to a report under “Saved Reports” in the Customization section of the left-hand sidebar.
“Export” creates a file of a report. A report may be exported as a PDF, CSV, Google Sheet, or Excel (.xlsx) file.
“Share” creates an email attachment of a report. You can schedule regular updates of a report to be sent via email to recipients, too. I think this may be helpful if you’re managing a Google Analytics account for a business and want to send daily or weekly updates of key metrics to managers or other decision-makers.

Create a Dashboard

Some metrics are more valuable to your business than others. You can create dashboards to highlight these key metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs).

To Create a dashboard,

Navigate to Customization → Dashboards in the left-hand sidebar.
Click “Create.”
Choose between “Blank Canvas,” “Starter Dashboard,” or “Import from [Google Analytics Solutions] Gallery.” Also, name the dashboard!
Click “Add Widget” to begin customizing your new dashboard.
You can,
1. Name the widget.
2. Choose “Standard” or “Real-Time” visualizations to be displayed by the widget.
3. Choose the metric to be displayed.
4. Add a filter to the widget.
Click “Customize Dashboard” to format the dashboard into columns or simply drag and drop widgets wherever you want them.
Hover over a widget to see “Edit” and “Delete” options.

Google Analytics allows 20 private dashboards per user and 50 shared dashboards per view. You can see whether a dashboard is private or shared within the table of dashboards on the page Customization → Dashboards.

Historical Minimalism

I found a post by Joshua Becker titled “Minimalism: Historically Important.” Becker discusses the historical presence of simple living or “minimalism.”

The term “minimalism” is relatively new as far as it pertains to lifestyle, but the ideas of living simply, living within or below your means, and being conscientious of material possessions, these ideas are old and reiterated throughout history.

How many times do we have to encounter an idea before we recognize the value of it? I think the situation has to be “just right” for us to really engage with an idea that we encounter. There has to be some amount of pain or discomfort to make us realize the need for change and to begin a path towards change.

Posting Daily

Derek Sivers decided to write a post every day for thirty days. I haven’t read the posts he wrote, but I found his summary post reflecting on the experience of posting daily. Ultimately, he didn’t enjoy the experiment for three reasons:

The quality of his writing decreased as he rushed to post something daily.
He felt that his posts weren’t 100% worth his readers’ time. This broke a silent promise Sivers has with his readers.
He didn’t devote time to any other projects he’s working on because writing his daily posts took three to six hours per day.

At the end of the experiment, Sivers decided to search for a happy medium, where he won’t post daily but he will post more frequently than he used to.

I think experiments like this are amazing for anyone interested in content creation. The volume of content that an individual can sustainably produce over time without burning out is an important metric for any content creator. Some people, like Gary Vaynerchuk, are able to produce a seemingly overwhelming volume of content and love doing it. Others may produce one meaningful piece of content a day, a week, a month, or a year.

For Sivers, it seems to me that his “happy medium” is posting articles periodically as regular content and writing books infrequently as pillar or cornerstone content. One commenter named Kumar posits that the weekly production of high-quality, long-form content may only be sustainable for an individual for 6 months to a year, max.

Conclusion

Whatever your velocity for content creation is, I’m sure it’ll take experimentation to find it. Currently, I’m posting daily for the Daily Learning category. While I don’t think these posts are terribly high-quality or worth most readers’ time, this is a personal experiment and the stakes are low. I am trying to improve my mindfulness around content consumption, learn more deeply from the content I do consume, and develop a habit of creating regularly.

The featured image is by Brandi Redd on Unsplash.