DailyPM — A short daily newsletter that helps you get better. Lessons and my most popular posts.

This morning, I published my 126th DailyPM post. On January 1st, I launched my project to build a daily newsletter and so far it has been great. The newsletter is focussed around “getting better”: growing and learning as a professional, as a leader and as a co-worker. Not yet following along and want to try? Sign up here!

For some time I wanted to do a little roundup: share a couple of popular posts and share a couple of things I learned while running this thing.

The lessons

1. Side projects need planning

So far, I wrote around 29,000 words, which is on average 230 words every day. For a professional writer, this is not that much. Add a pretty demanding full time job to that, and it gets quite a bit harder. I set apart two nights every week to work on the items for next week. Most weeks, I’m adding quite a big chunk of my Saturday and Sunday to this as well. This means sitting down to write, even if I don’t feel like it. Most of the times, after a couple of minutes I get in that flow. I’m working on multiple topics at the same time, which helps too: when I get stuck I can switch to another post ad pick it up later.

2. Inspiration is everywhere

I keep a running list of topics to write about. This list gets filled by things people say, books and blogs I read and items that catch my attention in podcasts. But most importantly: the list gets filled by putting in the time to brainstorm and think.

By keeping posts short and focussed on as few distinct topics as possible, I can spread out separate concepts too. I often end up splitting concepts to make them easier to digest and help me keep my stash filled.

3. Automation is key

I’m using MailChimp to send out the newsletter and Tumblr to feed my blog. I like to format the posts for the newsletter a bit differently, so I manually add the posts to MailChimp and Tumblr. From there it is all automatic: I’m using IFTTT to share the newsletter to Twitter and LinkedIn. The post on Tumblr is automatically posted on Medium as well. This way, I can prepare everything over the weekend and focus on my work and other stuff during the week.

Automating these steps saves time, and there is less stuff that can go wrong. And, as a developer, it is always nice to tinker with a platform like IFTTT to make things easier.

4. Inspect and adapt

This scrum-concept applies to these kind of side projects too. I started DailyPM with a strong focus around product management. While I still have the occasional post around product, the focus of the items shifted a bit towards productivity, general management and more “how to get better” posts. I found that my current audience likes this type of content, and I tend to read a lot around this concept, so writing comes pretty easy too. On inspection I liked the change, so I changed the forms and other wording to be a bit more generic.

Most popular posts

I wanted to share a couple of posts that people really liked, based on eyeballs and responses I got. It gives you a sense of the things you can expect.

Black and white: sometimes gradually changing yourself doesn’t work. This is a completely different approach.

Delivering negative feedback: if you want to help others grow, you need to be able to tell others the truth. A couple of thoughts and ideas on how to do this.

Trust but verify: delegation can be difficult. This post gives a couple of concrete pointers what to do to be better at delegation, by using a concept called “Trust, but verify”.

The Eisenhower-matrix: how to decide what to do with any given task? This matrix can help you pick, by drawing a line between important/not-important and urgent/not-urgent.

Rethink e-mail: we’re all dealing with it, and it takes up so much of our time that for most of us it is absolutely worth it to revisit our e-mail strategy. I’m dropping a couple of ideas in this post.

Don’t criticize, condemn or complain: from the famous book “How to win friends and influence people” comes this great concept. Bottom line: it won’t help you get your point across.

This should give you an idea of the content to expect. Short, actionable and focussed around a single concept, every morning. You can find an archive of all the posts on my website.

Want to grow and learn something new every morning? You should sign up for my daily newsletter. Looking forward to talk to you tomorrow!