Experiment of a year or how I was in the top Habr / GT

KDPV great illustrator Rina Z.

The cognitive distortion of the "survivor's mistake" and the abundance of "success stories" of questionable utility undermine the credibility of the stories of his experience. At the same time, I want to share it - what if it is useful to someone? A little less than a year ago, I was fascinated by the idea of ​​writing non-fiction publications not in the mode when it is convenient, but at least one per week. In addition to the popularization of astronautics, some observations on GTD were expected as a side effect. Now, after completing the experiment, I offer you something like a report with comments.

How I came to such a life

I got seriously ill with cosmonautics in 2012, seeing several films on a space theme in succession as a way to celebrate Cosmonautics Day. I had previously been interested in technology, weapons and aircraft, so this was not a completely unusual change. On the other hand, I was rather indifferent towards space specifically, and, having a general idea, I did not want to dig deeper.

By the way, my first cosmic “project” ended, in fact, with failure. I got the idea to remake the Race Into Space strategy. About a year I did it in my spare time, I reached the level of approximately the alpha version, which I released in April 2013. By May, I repaired several detected bugs and talked about my work on Habré.
')
Good thing social networks - they keep logs of what was interesting to you. And these logs show that the idea to engage in popularization did not appear instantly, it became noticeable sometime from the beginning of 2013. Seven years of work as a teacher and natural bore, obviously, were looking for a way out in the desire to educate the masses. I rejected the idea of ​​creating a community on VKontakte or something similar, because the “often write short notes” format is not compatible with the usual office schedule, and I find at least unethical to be distracted during working hours for such hobbies. Some content just went on the wall, which was very inefficient. It would probably be a good option to deliver content to already existing communities, but this idea did not occur to me, or did not arouse interest. I wrote several posts for the portal “Made by Us”, but quickly I got bored there.

Being an IT specialist, I read Habr constantly, and I was quite happy with reading without the possibility of commenting. In the summer of 2013, active discussions on the state of affairs in the Russian space program took place at Habré, and, after another discussion in the comments, I, thinking that the topics at Habré were in great shortage, “reserved” this question for a full-fledged publication. Accident - less than a day after its publication , the “Proton” epically fell, and, already a fairly well-evaluated publication began to disperse along the Runet as an “authoritative opinion”. After this occasional success, several more publications were written that were well received by the community. And, as they say, "wrap everything ..."

In contrast to the publications, in the remake things went bad. The next task of the development plan was to write multiplayer, but I could not get the sockets to transfer data normally - the player’s move did not reach his opponent in the absence of noticeable errors. In the human psyche, motivation depends on success, so it was all the less interesting to mend bugs in the game, and more and more interesting to write articles. In general, at the end of 2013, the remake project was frozen, and so that it was not embarrassing, it was decided to take some kind of “weighting” for writing publications, and this experiment became.

About the work plan

Why at least one publication per week? I work according to the usual schedule from 9 to 18 and initially selected holidays for the experiment. The abundance of free time on weekends added another goal - publication should be more complicated than simple and short news, it should be a review, compilation, analytics or, ideally, nano-research. Initially, the work was done over the weekend, on Monday it was edited and published, but after a few weeks the growth of qualification increased the speed of work, and the publication began to be made on Sunday evening. Plus, it seemed to me (I can not prove it with numbers in my hands) that the publication on Sunday evening makes it easier for the post to go to the first page, where it is read many times more. The mechanism, it seems to me, is simple - there are fewer publications on Sunday evening, so a small positive rating at first is enough for the article to be on the first page at the peak of Monday morning. However, now, after budding GT from Habr, this knowledge is hardly very useful.
One publication takes approximately 12-15 hours of direct work. I have not timed up to a second, this is an approximate estimate. Usually the topic is chosen on weekdays, in free time material on the topic is searched, Saturday is almost always spent on leisure and household affairs, and the main work is carried out on Sunday. Hours to 15-18 Ufa material is ready, it passes the editing and is usually published in 19 MSK.

Taking this opportunity, I want to thank my wonderful wife. We got sick of the cosmos together, and she was the permanent editor, proofreader and tester of all my publications. Editor and tester for your posts - it is extremely useful, someone else's eye sees typos, errors and wording that are incomprehensible to anyone except the author.

In principle, I was lucky in something. During this year I didn’t go to the hospital, I didn’t end up in conditions of multi-week processing, when outside of work everything except sleep is an unaffordable luxury. The biggest problems for fulfilling the plan were the hard disk crash of the home computer in July (worked with Ubuntu LiveDVD) and the cold in August (it worked for 2-3 hours, it was resting for an hour). So no stories of pretentious overcoming will not work, alas.

About GTD

I can not say that it works for everyone and always, but for myself I made a clear conclusion - the reason for procrastination is the unwillingness to do the work that you are postponing. Let me tell you by my example - laziness consistently won on Saturdays, when I tapped on the Internet, played and wasted time in other ways. A rare publication exceeded a couple of paragraphs on Saturday evening. The situation was worsened by the feeling that I would have enough time to do the work on Sunday, especially since this sensation was justified. Probably, from the point of view of experiential study of efficiency issues, it was worth going to the limit of my productivity, but I did not dare to do that. In general, from the point of view of GTD, the results are practically absent - I did not use any special techniques, I did not eat frogs, I didn’t cut tomatoes, I just sat down and worked. With consistently performed work for a sufficiently long period of time, this is somewhat depressing.
Another thing that can be attributed to GTD is the question of plans. Unfortunately, I did not have a detailed plan for what I would do besides the experiment. The plan was rather in the form of:

1. Make good content.
2. Someone will pay attention.
3. ???????
4. PROFIT

It is necessary to note the passivity and uncertainty of such a position. However, for the year, the "catch" was approximately as follows:

1. One offer rewriting to order.
2. One sentence to write reviews on the technique.
3. Once a representative of a Russian publishing house contacted, he suggested writing a book, but after a while the publishing house changed its mind due to financial problems.
4. Once about two weeks in social networks they asked for an invite. Which is typical, after I wrote that I’m not just distributing invites, the requests stopped, but nobody asked for help in editing the sandbox article.

Biggest fear

The only thing I was seriously afraid of was the lack of ideas for articles. Consciousness painted a terrible picture - I sit down at the computer and I understand that I ran out of topics on which it would be possible to write something. It would be a real failure. In order to delay his offensive, I even made a special file, where I wrote down my ideas and suggestions from the comments, so as not to forget them and not lose them. Curiously, the situation turned out to be completely inverse - the number of interesting topics constantly exceeds my productivity, and before every weekend I chose the most “tasty” and interesting. However, the annual experience of the lack of topics for publications helps weakly - the horror of inevitable creative exhaustion still looms on the horizon.

The initial impetus for publication can be anything - the anniversary of some event, news, or some random event. For example, a large and successful series “Imperceptible difficulties of rocket technology” has grown, probably, from this dialogue , because I have a need to explain that the launch vehicle is a complex and interesting unit, the importance of which has been lost in its familiarity.

About statistics, vanity and predictive ability

Probably, it would be logical to expect that a high place in the rating would be taken after some time. It's funny, but it turned out the opposite - in the first place in the ranking I was two weeks later, I stayed there for a week or two, and since then I have been in the top-10.

The only additional statistics that I kept on my own was the accounting for karma. I expected in the end to see the logistic curve, in principle, the schedule is even a bit like:



Apparently, the final saturation will occur in the region of 450-500 units, if it is not possible to fix something legendary in the future.

I do not know, maybe someone here can predict the rating of his publication, but I do not belong to such people. Yes, there are some obvious considerations about what might be interesting to people, but the final result can be very different. For example, if I were asked which publications I regard as undervalued or overvalued, then I would reply as follows:
Undervalued:

• A training / game program for calculating a multi-stage rocket . Apparently, I strongly overestimated my ability to create attractive games, probably, and a frozen remake would have waited for a similar fate.
• Landing on PTK NP . I just don’t understand here - the task of exact landing is both interesting and competitive.
• Lecture "Space bikes" . I don’t know, maybe it’s the pre-Christmas fall in interest or the publication on Monday morning (YouTube has been uploading and processing it for a long time), but, in my opinion, this is one of the best lectures.

Overvalued:

• "Launch facilities" . Probably, the lack of difficulties with writing caused the feeling that this material is less valuable than it was appreciated. Besides, this is just a compilation of facts.
• The news about the possible cause of the accident "Antares" . Just news, no flight of thought.

After dividing the resource into Habr and GT, the Pulse Habr service, unfortunately, did not support GT, so the rating had to be counted in pens.



If we assume that all publications were made with approximately the same interest, then there is no correlation between it and the final result. I hope this will console someone who tried very hard, but his publication was not adequately appreciated.

About separation

In October, only the lazy did not express his opinion on the division of Habr into two projects. I decided to wait for this report. Despite the fact that for me the separation of projects has worsened the situation, I support it. Habr is an excellent accumulator of professional knowledge. But even working as an IT specialist, I found some articles with a high rating too complex and highly professional. Popular science publications and news in such an environment sounded a distinct discord. I hope that at the end of the year, TM will delight us with project attendance statistics, but it seems to me that both projects have a good future. Habr will continue to accumulate high-quality IT content, and on GT there will be an abundance of entertaining and scientific-popular materials. There used to be an excellent resource Membrana, which, unfortunately, ceased to exist. I think, GT has every chance to occupy this niche.

About monetization

A chic situation - getting paid for your hobby. You make content, educate people, bring the victory of technocracy and singularity, and you also get paid for it. On Habré there is a so-called. PPA - Authors Support Program, in which users who have passed a fairly high threshold for entering 11 articles with a rating> 50 ( now the rules have changed ) can receive money for successful posts. The breadth of thematic hubs was such that the publication without remorse of conscience was placed not even in one, but in two specialized hubs. I managed to participate in this program for several months, but it ended with the sharing of resources. So I would be glad to tell you “how to make a lot of money on the Internet,” but I don’t know it myself.

About LJ and PR

In May, I began to copy publications to my LiveJournal, which had been gathering dust for several years. Initially, it was a practical calculation: if I, for example, were banned from Habré, the content would not have disappeared along with the account. Then there was a stage when “crazy” money with the PPA went to buy promo in LJ. The method was wonderful and did not require movement of the brains. After the end of the income of the PPA and the increase in prices for LJ promo at the weekend, the toad began to choke on this method of promotion. In general, for the year, I can not boast of success on this site and, moreover, give advice on how to unwind there.

In general, I can not say that I really like LJ, but there is a large audience, and, as a popularizer, I have to reckon with this. And the discussion culture on Habré / GT is almost ten times higher.

What to do on the New Year holidays

On the Christmas holidays, I plan to finally relax. And if you have free time, I recommend as many as two options:

• Learning to fly in Orbiter is a truly unique experience of flying “like real cosmonauts” with honest Newtonian physics. For the year, a good educational series was obtained, from simple to complex.
• View a series of lectures on space . The Beauty of the Cosmos, The History of Cosmonautics, Cosmic Catastrophes and Accidents, and Space Bikes are a whole set of interesting lectures that you can watch or listen to.

About plans

Now, after the end of the experiment, I think about what would be interesting to come up with for 2015. You can leave everything as it is. You can do attempts to unwind at other sites and resources. You can try to write a book. You can try to achieve maximum performance by ripping content without any rest. The only thing I have so far firmly planned is to participate in the holding of the “Yuriev night” in Ufa.

Ideas, comments, questions, thanks, curses and other feedback are accepted in any way you like - in the comments, in a personal, etc. Thank you for reading me in 2014. Holiday greetings!