Review of 2011

I started blogging at the end of 2008, so 2011 was my third full year of blogging. So I thought it might be a good time to review briefly my blog activity and life in general.

The number of blog posts I wrote in 2011 was 84, which is slightly down on the 113 posts I wrote in 2010. However, most of the drop is accounted for by the elimination of the weekly reviews, which I started at the start of 2010 and then abandoned. I have settled into a steady rhythm of roughly 2 posts a week and a reasonably stable set of topics involving mainly technology and gadgets.

I am happy with the tone of the blog and the level of interest it generates. The one thing that surprises me is how little I blog about IBM or the products that I work on. I think that the reason for this is not that I don't have anything to say about IBM products, but it is because I need to think more carefully before expressing an opinion about IBM products. For example, I spent almost 3 months working on a recent article for Developerworks while a typical blog post is written is less than a half an hour. I may increase the work related content on my blog, but it will probably involve mainly short posts pointing at more substantial articles that already exist elsewhere on the web.

In terms of life changes, the biggest change in 2011 was my decision to move from a people management role to an individual contributor role. As I blogged recently, I am still struggling to settle in to the changed role, but I am still happy that I took this brave decision. I think that it will the end of 2012 before I will be totally clear on how I feel about the change.


Getting Things Done (GTD) was one of the main topics in my blog for 2010, but it is not mentioned at all in 2011. This is mainly because I have stopped implementing the GTD methodology.  My decision to abandon GTD is because my work now involves a smaller set of substantial tasks to complete as compared to my former role as a manager which involved tracking many different tasks each of which involved less work from me directly.