Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog and one of the things I most enjoy in life. My travel for 2024 ran right up to within a few hours of the New Year... when I returned from a great both fun and frustrating trip to ( Read more... )

It's my 4 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 13 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both ( Read more... )

It's been a couple months since I wrote about my stats on blogging. Here's a check-in on the month just finished, September 2024. I wrote 57 entries in the month, for an average of 1.9 per day.

As I often do with  goal setting I set a range of three goals, low, medium, and high. The low, or baseline goal is the minimum I want to meet. The medium ( Read more... )

Recently I've been writing about the use of metrics in the workplace, especially the pitfalls of using them poorly or simplistically. The pitfall I'm writing about in this chapter is how when a measure becomes the objective it ceases to be a good measure.

This is often called Goodhart's Law (Wikipedia link), based on the writings of a British ( Read more... )

Yesterday I started writing about metrics. Specifically, using metrics on people in the workplace. It's become a fact of modern life that we're constantly measured in what we do at work. So much of what we do is already managed through computer software, and modern computer software makes it trivial to collect- and report- metrics. But the ( Read more... )

I'm thinking again about metrics in the workplace. I'm specifically referring to metrics on human work. For example, "How many tasks did each person on the team complete last week?" "What's the average time for a person to do X?" "What percentage of their time is this person/this team spending on category Y ( Read more... )

It's been kind of a busy couple months for blogging. I say kind of because while I've posted above my average for April and May there's a lot of stuff I didn't write (yet) because I didn't have time or energy (or both). Let me share a chart since the last time I posted one of those was 3 months ago.


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It's like a case of "Ask, and ye shall receive." After I posted earlier today about the increasing number of 401(k) millionaires and noted that that widely-reported news story only describes the top 2% of the population and doesn't say anything about how well the average American is saving for retirement, I see another article pop up in my newsfeed ( Read more... )

There was good news in finance this week, at least for those fortunate enough to have a lot of it. Across 2023 more have a lot of it. Fidelity reported that the number of its customers who have retirement account balances of $1 million or more increased by 40% from a year earlier. Here's a chart of numbers published in this article in Yahoo! ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I've checked in on stats about my blogging. I track metrics mostly out of curiosity but also because long ago I set goals and I like to see how I'm doing compared to my own predictions/expectations.

One thing about setting goals is that I rarely set just a goal. I set a multiplicity of goals. Sometimes that based on ( Read more... )