I have been blogging now in one form or another for a little less than nine years. I have always blogged for myself, as a learning tool, as much as for an audience. I needed a collaboration partner, to help me figure things out, and I decided that “the internet” was going to be my partner. You know the old expression “if you can explain it to someone else, you can tell whether you understand it”. I usually blog about something that is frustrating me at work, and try to find a way forward out of that frustration. I rarely “rant”, because while cathartic, it isn’t that productive, as focusing on the negative tends to keep me stuck. I look for ways to make progress, to change or adapt, to help others get unstuck.
I have a little less than 250 blog posts on this blog (I have two other blogs). Today I was looking at the stats and I was amazed that two posts pretty much have more traffic than all other posts combined. Each of them have almost 3000 views – since I moved to a self-hosted WordPress a few years ago. And the closest competitor has like 208. Its ridiculous. The interesting thing is that they are two of my favorite posts as well. I often re-read older posts, to see if my opinion has changed, or if I have learned new things that make the older posts less important. I treat this blog kind of like a journal of work frustrations, in that regard. One thing these posts have in common is that they are comparisons – they have versus in the title. Another thing they have in common is that they are on common popular topics: productivity for one, and agile project manager for the other.
So I thought that I would re-share my two most popular posts, and ask my collaboration partner, why these have more traction than anything else:
Performance vs. Effectiveness and Productivity vs. Efficiency
Agile Delivery Manager vs. Project Manager