Photo by Tina Keller

“I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school
Or steal my Daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool
Or find myself a rock and roll band that needs a helping hand
Oh Maggie I wish I’d never seen your face”

- Rod Stewart, in a moment of career confusion

This is a follow-up to I Am Problogger, Hear Me Roar, where I announced that I was going on a mini-retirement to become a full time blogger.

I went back to work nearly two months ago (didn’t realize it had been that long), so my mini-retirement lasted nearly 5 months. I’ve been meaning to post an update about the full time blogging experiment: what worked, what didn’t, and where to go from here.

The overall outcome

Looking at the total effect on my quality of life, the mini-retirement was a fantastic success. Being in control of my life (you know, like an adult) was like breathing for the first time. Just ending my sleep deprivation alone made a world of difference. There’s nothing like being able to do what you want, when you want. I ate better, exercised more, had better health, more energy, a better social life, and more time for both work and fun. Not that everything was perfect all the time, but it was a day and night difference.

In the beginning, I was actually a little bit concerned that I might become bored. I didn’t really think so, but so many retirees have said they couldn’t figure out what to do with their newfound freedom, and they had to get a job just to have something to do. Now I can say I have no idea what’s wrong with those freaks. Equating freedom with boredom is the lie of the lie of the 4-hour workweek. If you get bored, something is seriously wrong with you. You might consider consulting with a neurosurgeon to see if you can get a chip implanted in your brain that would endow you with imagination, curiosity, and a sense of purpose.

I don’t know, maybe I was supposed to be European. I’ve never accepted work as a substitute for life. I don’t even think I’m lazy, just highly resistant to devoting my life to something that isn’t really my thing. But what is my thing?

Good question. I quickly found out that I don’t want to do something just to make money. Like if I was doing something that let me work from home on my own schedule, but it was something that I didn’t really care about, would that really be any better than having a job? No, it would probably just be far more work for far less money.

Knowing that allowed me to rule out a lot of options. A lot of the time, I’d consider something and think, “Well, I’d do it if it paid a lot from day one. But is it interesting enough to be worth putting in tons of effort, not knowing if it would ever pay a decent income?” And if the answer was no, I had to pass.

So far, the only thing for which the answer has been yes is blogging, and that’s why I’ve focused on it. (I use the term “blogging” in a very broad sense. Ebooks, affiliate marketing, even consulting or services that result from my blog–anything that turns my ideas into money–it’s all “blogging” to me. No need being picky about the delivery mechanism.)

So how did that work out?

The blogging results

Looking at my mini-retirement purely from a blogging perspective, it was an absolute disaster. In five months, my subscriber count increased by about 40%. In the five months prior to that, when I was blogging part time, my subscriber count increased by about 130%.

That’s right, I got more than triple the results when I was blogging part time!

And I’ve got to tell you, this was very disappointing. If I had maintained my previous growth rate, I’d have ended up with 1,400 subscribers. If I had doubled my growth rate, which would be reasonable since I was doing it full time, I’d have gotten to 2,200 subscribers. But why would my growth rate plummet?

I got this in an email from a new reader, who wanted to remain anonymous:

“From what I’ve seen, the quality of your posts truly stands out. How is it possible that you only have 800 subscribers? I mean, that’s a lot in its own right. But I think your stuff should demand a larger following.”

Why thank you reader, and I agree with you! But while my results were disappointing, they’re also encouraging in a way. I now have confirmation that blogging results have little to no correlation with how much time you put in. Which means you don’t have to work yourself to death. In fact, working too much can not only be unhelpful, but counterproductive (and when you consider the effect on your quality of life, it hurts you far more).

I don’t like things that appear random. Everything has a reason, and I want to know it. I know it’s not just a matter of “less work = better results.” I think the conclusion is that doing the right things is far more important than doing a lot of things. But what are the right things?

One thing I think I’m doing right is having a unique voice. There will always be people who don’t like it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of being a copy of someone else. One reason I wanted to start a blog is because I was so frustrated that out of all the people I saw talking online, nobody was really saying anything. I eventually found people who would go beyond rehashing the same old stuff, but the really good blogs are a tiny percentage of the total. Even if your feed reader is full of blogs you love, remember how long it took to find those needles in a haystack.

Ron Hitson (no URL given) feels the same way. In a comment spliced together with an email he gave me permission to quote, he said:

“Hunter, your blog is the only blog I follow. You actually add value and a good perspective. IMO bloggers only offer opinions of things that have already occurred…I like your blog because you’re somewhat of a ‘thought leader’ (like Steve Pavlina). You guys bring fresh thinking to ‘the game.’ Most other bloggers have the same stuff, it’s just repackaged.”

OK, “thought leader” is totally going into my personal branding statement! But here’s the point: if there are even a handful of people saying things like this, I’m going to choose to listen to what they’re saying (keep going) instead of what the stats are saying (give up).

The new 3-step plan

Still, I was putting in too much effort for too little results, so something had to change. I’ve been trying a new strategy, and while it’s too soon to judge the results, it feels like a good idea. Here are the 3 parts.

1. Post less.

When I went full time, I increased my posting frequency from about twice a week to about four times a week. I didn’t want to increase it too much because it didn’t seem like it would help. A lot of people say you need to post every day to keep people coming back to your blog, but why? If someone’s subscribed, they’re subscribed. Why does it matter how often they visit?

In fact, I thought posting too much could hurt me. Giving tons of posts to people who are already subscribed won’t make them subscribe twice. But it might make them unsubscribe if they have too much to read. Actually, is that what happened? After all, I must have done something different that slashed my growth rate, and I don’t know what else it could have been.

I don’t want to overload my readers. I want to take care of them, but then spend as much time as possible going after new readers. That’s how you grow.

Writing posts like the 5,336 word Lightworkers, Darkworkers, And The Other Kind was taking a toll on me. (That one took 3 days to write; I don’t know how many hours.) And now I just don’t have the time.

I’m still going to be posting regularly, just not as much. And maybe with more short posts (which for me means less than 1,000 words). And maybe being a little less thorough (I actually rented the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies as research for The Inductive Oracle, The Deductive Merovingian).

2. Stop reading blogs.

This was a really tough decision to make, but it had to be done. I was spending about 40 hours a week just reading and commenting on blogs. Then I’d think about how there were so many more blogs I wanted to read. I was living in reaction mode, with a never-ending to do list. At times I felt like I was going to snap. (I talked about this in detail in Why We’re Failing The 4-Hour Workweek.)

When I first started reading blogs, I soon learned that you could subscribe to a blog to make sure you didn’t miss any posts. And I remember thinking that no blog could possibly be good enough to subscribe to. While I’ve changed my thinking on that, I still don’t want to try to keep up with everything.

I’ve tried cutting back several times, but somehow I’d just get back in the habit every time. I had to quit cold turkey.

When I get home from work, I just have a few hours before I have to go to bed. With all the different ways I could spend my time, how many of those hours do I really want to spend reading blogs, as good as they might be?

(And in reality, I’m still reading blogs. Just fewer of them, with much more skimming and much less commenting. I don’t want to quit entirely. But if I tell myself that I’ve stopped reading blogs, my conscious mind will act accordingly. I think I can keep my blog reading to less than an hour a day.)

3. Use Twitter more.

But there’s a problem here. If I’m not commenting on many blogs, how will people find me? That’s where Twitter comes in.

I see Twitter as being very similar to commenting, only you don’t have to read a post first. I can send out tweets a lot faster than I can leave comments, and they can potentially be seen by far more people when I have enough followers.

This is an experiment for now, but hopefully it will prove to be effective.

Going forward

Some people took Blogger’s Paradise a bit more autobiographically than I had intended. I get frustrated sometimes, but I can’t imagine quitting blogging. I’m still getting warmed up.

As @stevepavlina tweeted, “The first million words of content are usually the hardest. ” I guess this can be considered the blogging version of the 10,000 hour rule. You have to pay your dues before you collect the rewards. I estimate that I’ve written a quarter of a million words on my blog. Make it a third of a million if you count my ebooks. Make it 335,333 if you count this post. It’s a start.

But I still continue to consider different options. Some people suggested that I get in on the iPhone app gold rush. And while that’s a reasonable idea, I’m already involved in one gold rush. If I’m going to do something else, it would have to be a better option than blogging.

But dare I say it, I actually seem to be connecting well with the new job. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be able to write a non-sarcastic version of Top 10 Reasons To Have A Job.

BTW, it’s come to my attention that comments aren’t working, at least for some people. I’ll try to get that working as soon as I can.

Photo by rodrigo senna

After being laid off from my software development job last Friday, I’m now a problogger! The last time this happened, I was “unemployed.” Now, I’m a “problogger,” which sounds infinitely cooler.

I’ve never liked the fact that the term is defined by something you don’t do (have a job) instead of something you do do (reaching certain blog milestones). Hehe, I just said doodoo. I also find it interesting that people write it as one word because they’re used to it as a domain and blog name. You wouldn’t write “he’s a protennisplayer,” right? Anyway, the term problogger has caught on, so I’ll stick with it.

What does being a problogger mean for me? I’m looking at three options.

1. Go back to work immediately

For close to two months, I suspected I would be laid off on or shortly after October 3. And every time someone asked me how the job search was coming along, my answer was “I haven’t started yet.” That was still my answer on Friday after being laid off.

My boss looked at me like I was crazy, and said, “Well, you really need to get on the ball now. You need to decide what your specialty will be within .NET development, because there are lots of opportunities…” I didn’t want to tell him that I stopped caring a long time ago.

Anyway, I made it to the end, so I get severance pay. I didn’t want to accept another job before then and miss out on the severance, but now it would be reasonable to look for another job. Still, I don’t think I’m going to.

In A Year Without Paychecks, Part 2, Akemi Gaines wrote about her life shortly after quitting her admin job in Oregon:

“There were mornings I woke up and wondered what to do. Occasionally, I thought of looking for temp jobs. Then I thought why the heck would I get another admin job in Oregon – if that was what I wanted to do, I didn’t need to quit. Duh.”

I love that Duh at the end. And that’s exactly right. I’ve been looking forward to being laid off (even dropping hints that they didn’t need me) so I didn’t have to work anymore. If I went back to work right away, then what did I need to get laid off for? Duh. Besides, you’d have to be crazy to want a job.

2. Stay retired forever

The opposite extreme is staying retired forever. By “retired,” I don’t mean lying comatose under a pile of empty beer cans, just not having a 9-5. I’ll talk more about that in the next section.

Tina Su has recently ditched her day job, getting by mainly on the income from her blog’s 400,000 monthly page views. But I’m not close to that yet.

I’m going to be looking into some different options for making money, such as freelance blogging (which I already do some of), other kinds of writing or editing, tutoring kids in math, day trading (just kidding!), etc. (Not sure how much you’re allowed to do outside of blogging without endangering your problogger status.)

But I keep reminding myself that the goal isn’t just to make money. I have to be careful not to pursue paths that will involve doing things I don’t like too much, for not too much money. Even if it’s not a job, it could very well be worse than one. Which leads me to the option I’m leaning towards…

3. Have a mini-retirement

The concept of mini-retirements was popularized by Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Workweek. Most people are participants in the deferred life plan, where you work for decades and then get to enjoy your life just in time to die. The idea of mini-retirements is that you split up your work life by taking short stints of temporary retirement, such as by living in another country for a few months. Tim’s life is now basically one mini-retirement after another, funded by the proceeds of his nutritional supplement business that he works on for 4 hours a week (thanks to masterful delegation, elimination, and automation).

Tim previously made up to $70,000 a month in different business ventures, but was working himself to death. Now he’s basically retired and does everything he wants for less than $5,000 a month. He says he’s not a multi-millionaire, nor does he particularly care to be one.

After reading his book, people sometimes say something like, “That’s so great that he stopped chasing money, because he realized that all that matters is happiness.” But if they think that, they apparently didn’t understand the book very well.

The only reason he can do everything he does is because he makes enough money to pay for everything without working (OK fine, working 4 hours a week). He doesn’t have to be a multi-millionaire because he found a way to create the passive income of one. (Generating $5,000 a month in dividends from an S&P 500 index fund takes roughly $5 million. There are better ways of doing it, but this is just an example.)

Likewise, everyone seems to love the story of the Harvard MBA and the Mexican fisherman, and they think it’s a great example of how money doesn’t matter. Except they’re missing the fact that the fisherman can only do what he does because he makes enough money from his hobby that he doesn’t have to work. I invite you to go fishing and see if you can support your family that way.

Every loves to say that money doesn’t buy happiness. True, but it does buy freedom.

My mini-retirement

Fortunately, I have enough money to buy a little freedom, so it looks like I’ll be taking a mini-retirement. Most people associate mini-retirements with travel, but I won’t be going anywhere (or at least, that won’t be the focus). I’m just not that into travel, and I already went to Japan and Charleston, SC this year, so I don’t feel the need.

One common problem of having too much time on your hands is the high risk of boredom. Many people don’t know what to do with their newfound freedom, and need to go back to work just to have something to do. That seems like an awful solution to me.

Tim Ferriss talks about “filling the void.” You suddenly have a bunch of empty time, and you have to fill it with something. The goal is not to be idle all the time, but to be active doing what you want to do. If you can’t think of anything better to do with your time than running in the rat race, then exactly how are you better than a rat?

I’m sure it will be an adjustment, but I’m not worried about being bored. For one thing, even if I suck at this and end up craving a 9-5, (1) at least I’ll know that I need to figure out what’s wrong with me, and (2) I’ll be a lot more enthusiastic about working after a break.

Besides, I think I have plenty to keep me busy. Because I’ll have a lot more physical and mental energy, I’ll be able to take up interesting projects that I just wasn’t motivated enough to do before.

I haven’t even begun my first day of retirement yet (since I’d have the weekend off anyway), but already I’ve experimented with my first vegetarian meal. Of course, everyone has vegetarian meals all the time (I never have meat for breakfast), but I mean consciously choosing vegetarian when meat was readily available and would have been my normal choice, and real food, not like when I went to a restaurant a few years ago and had ice cream for dinner.

I had a vegetarian burrito at Chipotle, and it was good. I could have easily made it vegan too–I don’t think I would have missed the cheese and guacamole. It was pretty enormous, and there’s actually a Smaller Burrito at Chipotle Petition you can sign. I’d just as soon make it two meals though.

I’m not saying I’m trying to become a vegetarian, but I’ve heard enough that I was interested in doing some experiments, though I didn’t have the energy to try before, because I don’t really like vegetables. But now I know that rice and beans and such seem like normal food to me. It’s a first step.

This is just one example of something I’m trying. My next post will announce a really wacky personal growth experiment I’m going to be doing. I don’t know everything I’m going to be doing in my mini-retirement, but I know it will be interesting (for me at least). I’m sure I’ll be writing about some of it, but at the same time, this blog isn’t a personal journal.

Time management will be a challenge. It’s easy to manage your time when you don’t have any, or when all you want to do is unwind after a stressful day at work. It’s a lot harder to manage your time when you have all the time in the world. You become overconfident in your ability to get everything done, and then at the end of the day you find that you didn’t actually do anything. I’m going to be whipping up a new todoodlist or two to stay on track.

One trap I’m going to be sure to avoid is spending too much time blogging, meaning both reading and writing (yes, even as a “problogger”). I used to often have huge chunks of free time at work that I could spend reading blogs, sometimes the full eight hours. But now, I have to always be asking myself, “Is this the most important thing I could be doing?” Blogging will still be a very important part of my day, but I want to do a lot more.

I’ve always had a hard time justifying mini-retirements because the mathematician in me would think about compound interest, and all the money I’d really be losing by not working. On the other hand, I’ve always been putting aside money for retirement, and now I’m going to be doing exactly what I’m saving for. There will always be jobs available, but I think I have to take this time to enjoy life now.

Here I am writing this on a Sunday night, and for the first time in a long while, I’m not dreading tomorrow.

P.S. Assuming FeedBurner is working correctly, I hit 600 subscribers yesterday. I guess I’m like John Chow: “I gain subscribers by telling people how many subscribers I gain.”