One month in, here’s how I have done

by | May 31, 2013 | Housekeeping

Takeaway: Month One has gone swimmingly. And I have a lot of cool feature-length articles and interviews coming up in June.

Estimated Reading Time: 1 minutes, 21s. But it’s very, very skimmable.

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That first month flew by. Like, really freaking flew. Below are: stats for the project, updates on my productivity experiments, site stats for May, media coverage I’ve received so far, and some new articles, experiments, and website features coming next month!

Screen Shot 2013-05-31 at 12.51.38 PMProject Stats

  • There were 23 “work” days in May (not including national holidays). Even though I took a couple of days off, volunteered, and moved, I more than made up for that time on other days!
  • Hours worked: 200.157 (average 8.7 hours/day, over 23 days)
  • Pages read: 630 (average 27.4 pages/day)
  • Words written: 21,743 (average 945 words/day!)

I’m pretty pumped by these stats – especially with how many words I wrote this month for articles for the project. That’s a third of a novel.1

Productivity Experiments

This project would be pretty pointless if I didn’t live the stuff I write about. That’s what my productivity experiments are for. Click that link for updates on how the experiments are going! Here’s a summary of my experiments:

  • Only turn on my smartphone for an hour/day: On track
  • Wake up at 5:30 every morning: Sidetracked
  • Write 200,000 words: On track
  • Meditate for 1 hour/day: On track
  • Be a recluse for 10 days: Not yet started
  • Reduce my body fat percentage to 10% and gain 10 pounds of lean muscle mass: Not yet started

Site Stats

This month has been crazy. All in all, I’ve received over 4,993 unique visitors over the last 31 days, and you guys have looked at articles 13,686 times. I’m very sincerely humbled, and incredibly pumped for the rest of the year.

Media Coverage

I’ve also been lucky to have been featured in a few news stories. One of them has already been aired, and three will be published soon (I’ll link to them when they’re up!):

Coming next month

Note: You can always see what’s upcoming on the calendar.

  • June 3 – June 7: Focus Week – Starts on Monday!
  • June 13: An interview with the world’s most productive musician, Ernie Halter
  • June 25 – July 4: 10 Days of Reclusion
  • June 27: The exact color to paint your office to become the most productive (I interviewed a world-renown color psychologist for this feature)

What else is next for June? I’m going to:

4 Reminders

  1. First, if you made it this far in the article, thank-you for reading. Truly.
  2. This project is fun and challenging for me, but I do it for you. If there’s a stat, experiment, or anything else you’d like to see, please contact me!
  3. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Weekly Recap Emailer! Each week you’ll receive links to the best articles from the week, project news, and more.

Thanks for following along!

Have a great weekend.

Notebook image courtesy of Sean McGrath.


  1. Source: http://askville.amazon.com/words-average/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=2288468 

Written by Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey has written hundreds of articles on the subject of productivity and is the author of three books: How to Calm Your Mind, Hyperfocus, and The Productivity Project. His books have been published in more than 40 languages. Chris writes about productivity on this site and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive without hating the process.

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