Thanks to some assistance from the awesome Joel of The Blog Tech Guy, the theme is installed, but I will continue to tinker with it for a while to work out the last few formatting issues and add some New and Exciting Features!!!

Stay tuned and thank you for your patience during the transition process.

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For those of you who don’t know the awesomeness that is Guy Kawasaki, Alltop is a new type of blog directory that aggregates the RSS feeds of many great blogs around the web. Never the Same River Twice is listed in the Lifehacks category with such amazing sites as:

• Lifehacker (of course)
• Zen Habits
• The Growing Life
• Steve Pavlina

Truly, I’m not worthy.

But I’ll take it

Everyone, click over to Alltop immediately, read the About Page, and see how this great service can help you find only the best stuff in the blogosphere.

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The problem is that life doesn’t usually work like this. We rarely encounter roads that are free from detours and traffic jams. At certain points, it may be more efficient to detour from your planned route. Maybe you’d find it interesting to take your time on secondary roads rather than speeding by on the Interstate. You may have an opportunity to take a short cut, or you may even decide that you don’t want to go to that destination anymore.

This is why I advocate using a compass, instead of a map. By knowing the general direction you want to go in but not the exact route, you have more flexibility to take those faster or more interesting routes. You may consciously decide to veer off course a little bit, but you’re not lost and you can head back in your desired direction at any time.

Okay, enough with the analogies…

How Does This “Compass” Thing Actually Work?

In a word… theme. Instead of creating painstakingly planned out goals with specific actions, measurable results and hard deadlines, choose one word or short phrase that embodies the theme of what you want to accomplish. As I explained, in relation to my blogging for 2008, I want to focus on Adding Value to people interested in personal and organizational change. There are many ways to do this, but there are also many ways to dink around and not accomplish much of anything as a blogger! Fortunately, because I have my compass point set to “Adding Value” I can ask myself the guiding question, “Does this blogging related activity add value for my audience?” I have done this frequently during the past three months.

Now, to be honest, not everything I’ve done has added value. Sometimes when I asked my guiding question the honest answer was, “No, but it’s fun!” That’s fine with me, so I kept at those things. The good thing is, having the compass to guide me keeps me from getting too far off course. The result is that I’ve done a lot of things that are both fun AND add value, but I didn’t know I was going to do all of these things on January 1. For example, I discovered Utterz and started recording podcasts a few weeks ago. This format makes my site accessible to a wider audience and provides variety to my regular readers. I also had the opportunity to participate in the March 2008 Bloghology group Ebook, which gave me the opportunity to interact with other bloggers and spread my message to a wider audience.

What are the Results? 

Oh, you want numbers? You want proof that this stuff actually works?! Well, okay.

According to Google Analytics, from October 1 through December 31, 2007 this site had 3,202 visits. This number nearly tripled to 8,714 visits from January 1 through March 31, 2008. Somebody (actually a lot of somebodies) took some time out of their lives to pop by humble blog. That’s pretty good growth and I’m happy with it. What makes me even happier is that the traffic came from lots of sources and was spread around to lots of posts.

Here are my top 5 most read posts:

1. Having Goals Will Make You Blind!
2. What Is Adaptive Capacity?
3. How to Do Scenario Planning
4. 7 Things to NOT Do If You Have Seasonal Affective Disorder
5. My 4 Hour Workweek: I Get My VAs For Free (actually the whole series did really well)

I also got a good amount of traffic through my forum and blog commenting participation. For example, I got over 500 visitors from Zen Habits, a blog that I comment on frequently. This shows me that I’m adding value in those communities and drawing visitors to my own blog community. That makes me happy

I hope this post has persuaded you to give the Compass method of goal setting a try in your life. Just start with a small area where you want to accomplish something in the near future and see what happens. And as always, if you’ve had experiences with this method, please share them in the comments.

Photo by… Oh dear, I don’t remember where I got this one. If this photo is yours, please email maria (at) neverthesamerivertwice (dot) com and I will give you due credit!

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What the Heck is Bloghology?
I’m glad you asked. Bloghology is the brainchild of Mert Erkal of Search for Blogging. He realized that it’s difficult for small and medium sized blogs to gain attention in the information-overloaded world that we all live in, so he decided to do something about it. Roughly once every 3 months, he releases a compilation of interviews with a variety of bloggers covering many subject areas. It’s in a .pdf Ebook format. This is obviously a great way for bloggers to gain exposure, and if you are a blogger I definitely recommend you sign up on the Bloghology homepage.

Why Should I Download Yet Another Free Ebook?

Because I asked you to?

Okay, for real, you should download this Ebook if you are interested in exploring up and coming blogs. Since you are reading this post, you are obviously a blog reader and we tend to have short attention spans. I know I’m always looking for new blogs (and always moving away from established blogs that have grown stale) and I’m guessing some of you do the same. Here’s just a sample of some of the bloggers featured in this edition of Bloghology.

• Blissful Travel which features awesome posts like The Best Beaches in Mexico
• Reason 4 Smile a personal development blog that will teach you All You Need to Know to Create Your Own Happiness
• And (this is definitely a new one for me) the very funny Henson’s Hell which devoted an entire post to The Strange Facial Contortions of Celine Dion. I think I like this guy!

The Ebook is a quick 52-page read and includes some bonus material from Mert on creating podcasts. I’m sure you’ll get some value out of Blohology, so just right-click on this HUGE image and download it today!

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A free, half-day pre-conference on emerging trends in change management

A two day course on change management fundamentals

If you can be in the Boston area at that time, I highly encourage you to check this out. More details can be found at the Change Management Toolbook’s Events page.

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