A year-long experiment or how I was in the top of Habr / GT

The CAP of the remarkable illustrator Rina Z. The

cognitive distortion of the “survivor's mistake” and the abundance of “success stories” of dubious usefulness undermine the credibility of stories about their 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 a convenient mode, but at least one per week. In addition to the popularization of astronautics, a side effect expected some observations on GTD. Now, after the completion of the experiment, I offer you something like a report with comments.

How did I get to such a life

I became seriously ill with astronautics in 2012, watching several films on a space topic in a row as a way to celebrate Cosmonautics Day. I had previously been interested in technology, weapons and aviation, so this was not a completely unusual change. On the other hand, I was rather indifferent to space specifically, and, having a general idea, I did not want to dig deeper.

By the way, my first space “project” ended, in fact, with failure. It occurred to me to make a remake of the Race Into Space strategy. For about a year I did it in my spare time, reached the level of about the alpha version, which I released in April 2013. By May, I fixed some of the discovered bugs and talked about my work on Habré.

Social networks are a good thing - they keep logs of what was interesting to you. And according to these logs, it is clear that the idea to engage in popularization did not appear instantly, it became noticeable somewhere in early 2013. Seven years of work as a teacher and natural tediousness, obviously, sought a way out in the desire to educate the broad masses of the people. I rejected the idea of ​​creating a VKontakte community or something similar, because the “often write short notes” format does not combine with the usual office schedule, and I consider it unethical to be distracted during working hours with such hobbies. Some content just went to the wall, which was very inefficient. It would probably be a good option to deliver content to existing communities, but this idea did not occur to me, or did not arouse interest. I wrote several posts for the “Made with us” portal,

Being an IT specialist, I always read Habr, and I was quite comfortable with reading without the possibility of commenting. In the summer of 2013, active discussions were held on Habré about the state of affairs in the Russian cosmonautics, and, after another discussion in the comments, I, thinking that the topics on Habré were in great short supply, “reserved” this issue for full publication. Accident - less than a day after its publication , “Proton” epically fell, and, already a fairly well-priced publication, began to diverge on Runet as an “authoritative opinion”. After this random success, several more publications were written that were well received by the community. And, as they say, "wrap everything up ..."

Unlike publications, things went bad in the remake. The next task on the development plan was to write a 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 less and less interesting for me to fix bugs in the game, and it was more and more interesting to write articles. In general, at the end of 2013, the draft remake was frozen, and so as not to be ashamed of it, it was decided to take some kind of “weighting” in writing publications, which became this experiment.

About the work plan

Why is there at least one publication per week? I work according to the usual schedule from 9 to 18 and for the experiment I initially allocated the days off. The abundance of free time on the weekend 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, skill development increased the speed of work, and publication began on Sunday evening. Plus, it seemed to me (I can’t prove it with numbers in my hands) that publishing on Sunday evening makes it easier to get the post on the first page, where it is read many times more. The mechanism, it seems to me, is simple - on Sunday evening there are fewer publications, so a small positive rating at first is enough, so that by the peak of Monday morning the article was already on the first page. However, now, after budding GT from Habr, this knowledge is hardly very useful.
One publication takes about 12-15 hours of direct work. I did not clock the time to a second, this is an approximate estimate. Usually a topic is chosen on weekdays, in free time material on the topic is searched, Saturday is almost always spent on leisure and household chores, and the main work is carried out on Sunday. The material is ready by 15-18 Ufa, it is being edited and usually published in 19 Moscow time.

I take this opportunity to thank my wonderful wife. We fell ill with space together, and she was the permanent editor, proofreader and tester of all my publications. The editor and tester for your posts is extremely useful, the prying eyes see typos, errors and wording that are incomprehensible to anyone except the author.

In principle, I was lucky in something. For this year I did not go to the hospital, did not find myself in conditions of weeks of processing, when out of work everything except sleep is an impermissible luxury. The biggest problems for fulfilling the plan were a crash of the hard drive of a home computer in July (I worked with Ubuntu LiveDVD) and a cold in August (I worked for 2-3 hours, I was resting for an hour). So no stories of pathos overcoming can be told, alas.

About GTD

I can’t 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 thing that you put off. Let me tell you by my own example - laziness consistently won on Saturdays, when I stupid on the Internet, played and wasted time in other ways. A rare publication exceeded a couple of paragraphs on Saturday evening. The situation was aggravated by the feeling that I would have time to do the work on Sunday, especially since this feeling was justified. Probably, from the point of view of an experimental study of efficiency issues, it was worth reaching the limit of my productivity, but I did not dare to do this. In general, from the point of view of GTD, the results are practically absent - I did not use any special techniques, did not eat frogs, did not cut tomatoes, just sat down and worked.
Another thing that can be attributed to the GTD is the issue of plans. Unfortunately, I did not have a detailed plan of what I would do other than the experiment. The plan was rather in the form of:

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

It should be noted the passivity and uncertainty of this position. However, over the year the “catch” was approximately as follows:

1. One rewrite offer to order.
2. One suggestion is to write reviews on technology.
3. Once a representative of a Russian publishing house contacted me and suggested writing a book, but after a while the publishing house changed its mind due to financial problems.
4. Every about two weeks in social networks requested an invite. What is typical, after I wrote that I just don’t give out invites, the requests stopped, but nobody asked for help in editing the article for the sandbox.

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 understand that I have run out of topics on which it would be possible to write something. That 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 comments so as not to forget them and not to lose them. It is curious, but the situation turned out to be completely opposite - 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 little - the horror of the 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, the large and successful series “The Subtle Complexities of Rocket Technology” probably grew out of this dialogue , because I had a need to explain that the launch vehicle is a complex and interesting unit, the importance of which is lost in its familiarity.

About statistics, vanity and predictive ability

Probably, it would be logical to expect that a high place in the ranking will be taken after some time. It’s funny, but it turned out the other way round - I ended up in the first place two weeks later, stayed there 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 karma accounting. I expected to see the logistic curve in the end, in principle, the graph is even a bit similar:



Apparently, the final saturation will occur in the region of 450-500 units, if it does not work out in the future to do something legendary.

I don’t know, maybe someone here can predict the rating of their publication, but I don’t belong to such people. Yes, there are some obvious considerations about what may be interesting to people, but the final result can be very different. For example, if I were asked which publications I consider to be underestimated or overestimated, then I would answer as follows:
Underestimated:

• Training / game program for calculating a multi-stage rocket . Apparently, I greatly overestimated my ability to create attractive games, probably, and a similar remake would have been waiting for a similar fate.
• Landing at the PTK NP . I just don’t understand here - the task of an exact landing is both interesting and competitive.
• Lecture "Cosmic tales . " I don’t know, maybe it was influenced by the New Year’s drop in interest or publication on Monday morning (YouTube downloaded and processed it for a very long time), but, in my opinion, it turned out to be one of the best lectures.

Revalued:

• "Launch facilities . " Probably, the lack of difficulties with writing caused the feeling that this material is less valuable than it was appreciated. Moreover, this is just a compilation of facts.
• News of the possible cause of the Antares accident . 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 calculated by hand.



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

About sharing

In October, only the lazy did not express his opinion on the division of Habr into two projects. I decided to wait until 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 as an IT professional, I found some highly rated articles too complex and highly professional. Non-fiction publications and news in such an environment sounded a distinct dissonance. I hope that at the end of the year TM will please 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, scientific and popular materials. Previously, there was an excellent resource Membrana, which, unfortunately, ceased to exist. I think

About monetization

The smart situation is to get money for your hobby. You produce content, educate people, bring the victory of technocracy and the singularity closer, and you get paid for it. On Habré there is a so-called PAP is the Author Support Program, in which users who have passed a 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 publication without remorse 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 sharing resources. So I’d be glad to tell you “how to make a lot of money on the Internet,” but I don’t know this myself.

About Learn and PR

In May, I began to copy publications to my LJ, which for several years was gathering dust without attention. Initially, it was a practical calculation: if I, for example, had been banned on Habr, the content would not have disappeared along with the account. Then there was the stage when the “crazy” money from the PSA went to buy a promo in LiveJournal. The method was wonderful and did not require movement of the convolutions. After the end of the PSA income and the increase in prices for LiveJournal, the weekend promo for this promotion method began to strangle the toad. In general, at the end of the year, I can not boast of success on this site and, moreover, give advice on how to get there.

In general, I can’t say that I like LJ very much, 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 an order of magnitude higher.

What to do on the New Year holidays

On New Year's holidays, I plan to finally relax. And if you have free time, I recommend two options:

• Learning to fly in Orbiter is a truly unique experience of flying “like real astronauts” with honest Newtonian physics. Over the year, a good training series has been obtained, from simple to complex.
• View a series of lectures on space . “The Beauty of Space”, “History of Cosmonautics”, “Space Disasters and Accidents” and “Space Tales” are a whole set of interesting lectures that you can watch or listen to.

About plans

Now, after the end of the experiment, I’m thinking about something interesting to come up with for 2015. You can leave it as it is. You can engage in attempts to spin up on other sites and resources. You can try to write a book. You can still try to achieve maximum performance by riveting content without any rest. The only thing that I have firmly planned so far is to participate in the “Yuryev night” in Ufa.

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