STELLAR writing retrospective #2
April 2024 progress vs. my STELLAR roadmap goals for writing here on Substack: recap on post sizes, 2 new lessons learned, actions, and plan adjustments for May
This post was originally published on agileteams.substack.com on May 6, 2024. As of July 12, all agile Teams content has moved to the agile section of karensmiley.substack.com. Please join us there!
When I posted at the start of March on the STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas workshop, I promised to do a retrospective each month on how I did vs. my goals. This post recaps what I learned in my second full month on Substack, and what I’m going to do differently in May!
Thanks for reading agile Teams! Subscribe for FREE to receive new posts (about monthly).
How It Started
My plan as of early March 2024, based on the STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas:
ST=writing online regularly (quality rating=2)
E=publishing new content (3-5x/week, quality rating=7)
LL=write drafts on my phone to 80-90% completeness, and then move to the desktop site (Substack or LinkedIn) for publishing.
A=set up my Substack presence; build a post log in Google Docs
R=review monthly to see if I hit my target of 12-20 new posts for the month
In retrospective #1, I revised my goals for April based on my expected (lower) availability during the month, and to have a more sustainable pace:
“I am lowering my publication target for April from 12-20 to 6-12 - basically,
1-2 per week for first two weeks of April
2-4 per week for the second two weeks of April
I’m aiming for a 50-50 mix of “short” posts and “long” posts:
each of the 6P posts on ethics of genAI for music will be planned as “long”
all other posts will be “short” (threshold to be set by analyzing the lengths of my other posts to date which did not trigger the Substack editor warning about length)
I will also aim for 2-3 Notes per week.”
How It’s Going
How’d I do in April? Here’s a look at each element of the STELLAR framework (other than ST, which isn’t changing). I’m going to change up the order a bit, though, and look at the Lessons Learned & Limits first.
LL - Lessons and Limits
Here’s what I did with the top 3 new lessons I learned during March.
March Lesson 1: Planning by Post Sizes
In the March retrospective, I recognized that I need to define my threshold for short vs long posts (what’s “short” and what’s “long”)? To evaluate thresholds, I used two lenses: my own data, and industry practices. This article goes into depth on the analysis for anyone interested.
Bottom line: I’ve decided to group my posts in 4 size categories to help me with planning and estimating my effort:
Very Short (< 200 words)
Short (200-799 words)
Medium (800-2499 words)
Long (>2500 words)
March Lesson 2: Friction in Collaborative Writing
During March, I felt a bit burnt by the friction of writing drafts with a combination of Google Docs (mobile) and Substack draft posts (laptop), due to:
(1) collaborators who don’t yet have Substack accounts, and
(2) inability to write Substack draft posts on mobile.
(1) wasn’t a big factor during April because all of my collaborators were on Substack and able to read drafts there. Re (2), I was able to carve out more on-laptop writing time in April. This alleviates the pressure to find ways to write my drafts on mobile.
For my planned May topics and collaborations, I expect these conditions to persist.
Bottom line: Although this friction may resurface in future, I’m going to defer pursuing a more efficient collaborative & mobile-friendly writing solution to the ‘last responsible moment’ and follow the YAGNI principle1, i.e. not invest effort in solving it now.
March Lesson 3: Planning for non-Post Writing
My third lesson from March was on planning better for Notes and the related effort. I wrote 20 Notes in April vs. 14 posts+pages in March. Of these 20, some were links I added as comments to my own posts and then flagged to be shared as Notes.
I don’t currently budget time for comments either, though. But at least they’re Very Short, as a rule, and I can do them on mobile (except for flagging a post comment to be shared as a Note, which isn’t currently an option in the iOS app).
Bottom line: I still need to work on measuring and planning effort based on post sizes and non-post quantities.
April Lesson 1: Connecting better with readers
I’ve been continuing to read advice on engaging more effectively. Substack has more amazing publications on this topic than I can keep up with! (, , and are high on my list.)
Two big tips I’m pursuing are:
(1) Use Notes more (I made progress during April; 20 Notes vs. 14 in March)
(2) Add audio voiceover to posts. The main motivations for voiceover are:
to engage and make a better human connection with all subscribers and readers
to support interested ‘readers’ who have more listening time and flexibility (e.g. while driving) than reading time and flexibility
to provide better accessibility to subscribers with low vision
“Write it, then read it aloud”2 is an excellent article that summarizes the benefits of adding audio voiceover.
April Lesson 2: Becoming a better writer
When looking at continuous improvement, my own writing skill is a critical aspect that I don’t want to neglect. As a start, I’ve been trying to pay more attention during April to sentence length (shortening!) and overall organization. I hope it’s helping, but I don’t know. If possible, I’d like to measure if I’m improving.
Obviously there’s a lot more to writing well than these metrics! Still, one good first step is to benchmark how I’m doing on things that can be measured easily.
See Actions below for executing on these 2 new lessons.
E - Progress towards End goal
My goal for April was to publish 6-12 posts. I published 9 posts on Substack across 3 publications, plus 4 Substack-relevant notes on LinkedIn. I also published 20 Substack Notes (most very short), and a handful of restacks without Notes.
The April Substack posts+pages included 2 Long, 5 Medium, and 2 Short. (For comparison, my March Substack posts+pages were 2 Long, 2 Medium, 8 Short, and 1 Very Short.) Details are below in the References.
Basically, beyond the longer agileTeams retrospective and 6P articles I had planned, I wrote unplanned shorter posts about topics I got excited about and just had to write. Going forward, I want to maximize that flexibility without compromising progress on my AI-focused topics (articles and future book chapters).
In terms of my quality level target, I stayed at level 5 in April (no change from March). I’m ok with that (happy that it didn’t go down, given my reduced targets for scope and effort).
From a Kanban / WIP limit perspective, I still have significant work in progress that isn’t yet ready to ship. Qualitatively, I’m somewhat dissatisfied that I didn’t publish Part 3 yet, even though I met my quantitative posting targets. Part of the reason Part 3 is still WIP is that I decided to do a more comprehensive survey of companies in that space before I narrow down to the top 5 (maybe 6, now) for Parts 4-7.
I still think the expansion of Part 3 coverage was the right decision; I’ll know better after it’s published and I get broader feedback. The increased effort required is a major consequence, though.
I’m actually kind of proud of myself for not “doing whatever it took” (i.e., overextending on effort, as I often have) to publish anyway in April with this expanded scope and the quality level I want. Keeping it sustainable is a win for avoiding burnout!
A - Actions
My self-assigned actions from the end of March, and their statuses, are:
(A1) Update my post planning log to break out long and short posts separately (Status: Done and in use)
(A2) Create spreadsheet to track planned and actual Post lengths (starting with actuals from the first 13 posts) and Notes (Status: Done and in use)
(A3) Find an alternative way to minimize rework due to incompatibilities and write more on mobile (Status: Deferred)
(A4) Continue to look for ways to streamline effort tracking (Status: In Progress)
See below for new self-assigned Actions.
R - Review (Retrospective)
I committed to do a monthly review at the end of April to see where I stand on my goals and actions - status: this article is it 😊
Bottom line:
I made good progress on my Actions.
I met my (reduced) posting targets for April 🎉.
My initial plan for 50-50 mix of short and long articles needs revision for using 4 size categories, and rebalancing to reflect the extra-Long size tail.
I’m not yet measuring non-post (Notes, comments) effort.
For now, I’m still manually logging my post writing effort. It’s imprecise, but is still proving useful.
I’ll reassess my targets and plan in my next monthly retro.
New Targets for May 2024 (month 3)
The last week of May is Memorial Day holiday here in the US. Based on “yesterday’s weather”3 and my expected other activities in May, I am keeping my lower end publication target from April, and reducing my upper-end target. My May goals are:
6-9 Posts: 2-3 per week for the first 3 weeks, in a mix of lengths:
1 Short agileTeams post on analyzing my size data (published)
1 Medium agileTeams retro post (this is it)
2 Long 6P posts on ethics of genAI for music (Part 3, and either Part 4 or a bonus spinoff on this topic)
2-5 Short or Medium posts in Agile Analytics and Beyond - topics unplanned; on whatever I get inspired to write about
12-18 Notes or Comments (Very Short): 4-6/week for the 3 weeks I’m working
to include LinkedIn posts of the links for the Medium and Long posts
My effort budget for May will be 4-6 hours/day, or 20-30 hours/week, for the first 3 weeks of May. This is well below the target of 50-60 total hours/week identified in a recent post4 about a successful Substack author and their effort level. It’s what I can do this month, though.
New Actions for May 2024
The two new lessons I identified during April were on pursuing audio voiceover, and working on improving my writing.
Audio Voiceover Experiments
I self-assigned 2 new actions for experimenting with audio voiceover:
(A5) Install an audio recording tool, set up a better-quality microphone, and verify audio quality (Status: Done)
(A6) Look into ethical AI-based text-to-speech tools that allow me to train a model on my own voice and use it to create my audio voiceovers (Status: In Progress)
For A6, interest in audio voiceover was part of the impetus in late April for spinning off from 6P Part 3 the research and writing for the AI Ventriloquism article on ethical genAI-based voice cloning.
Based on that research, Speechify and ElevenLabs are the only available tools that seem to meet my ethics criteria. I need to confirm that they won’t use my voice model for other purposes without my consent. I also need to check pricing (I’m still very much in ‘shoestring’ mode).
If those checks pass, I’ll want to compare the audio quality of AI-generated audio to the quality I get with recording the voiceover myself on my new Yeti setup. This experiment may not happen until June, though; May’s already looking pretty full.
Any volunteers who are willing to listen to the two sets of recordings and share feedback about the quality of audio (genAI-Karen vs human-Karen), and whether the voiceover adds or detracts from the ‘reader’ experience for a post? 🙂 Message me!
A big advantage I hear touted on using text-to-speech for audio voiceovers or podcasts is that it’s way more time-efficient: no repeated retakes due to interruptions, background noises, coughing, etc. I’ll measure the required time with both audio recording methods, and share what I learn from the experiment (including tradeoffs among quality, effort, and cost) in a future article in 6 P's in AI Pods or Agile Analytics and Beyond.
IF the tool experiment results are good enough, I can afford it, and I decide to adopt genAI voice cloning as part of my publishing toolkit, this decision will be logged on my AI Usage Policy page.
Improving My Writing
I self-assigned 2 new actions towards improving my writing:
(A7) Enable readability statistics, realtime checking for conciseness, and additional refinement checks in Word on my primary laptop (Status: Done)
(A8) Add readability metrics and average sentence length to my post log for past and upcoming articles (Status: To do)
Of course, there’s much more to becoming a better writer than what these metrics can measure! This is just one facet, and a start.
“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” (Confucius)
What’s Next
That’s my writing retrospective for April. I commit to doing another one after the end of May. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this!
Thanks for reading agile Teams! Subscribe for FREE to receive new posts (about monthly).
References
Notes written in April related to this topic:
Expected hours of work for succeeding with Substack (post by
)Varying post lengths and purposes (post by
)
Pages created during April
Posts published during April
agile Teams: 1 planned Medium-length post - my month 1 retrospective (1874 words)
6 P's in AI Pods: 2 Long posts on my planned topic (8-part series on “Unfair use? Ethics of generative AI for music”):
Part 2 on ethical risks and challenges (5305 words, including 28 endnotes)
Bonus “AI Ventriloquism” post which carved out the voice cloning/vocal cover topic from Part 3 WIP (3080 words, including 40 endnotes)
Agile Analytics and Beyond: 4 Medium-length posts and 2 Short posts, all unplanned:
My AI usage policy page, shared in Note (initially 500 words, will evolve)
“Brain vs Heart” post on unlocking the freedom to write & “say what I want” now (1635 words)
A page of collected favorite quotations (initially 1245 words, with embedded links to give credit; will evolve)
Two related articles:
Through the viewfinder: Seeing with photos (530 words)
Geese, software, and DEI: Thinking with photos (1022 words)
Inconvenient Principles: No (unfairly trained) AI images (1492 words)
LinkedIn posts:
On agileTeams page: (not in April statistics! Will add in next month’s analysis)
Share link - retrospective #1 (60 words)
Share link - Brain vs Heart (33 words)
My personal page:
Comment and share link - March 30 post on ageism (420 words)
Comments - ’s post about laughter distinguishing humans from AI bots (104 words)
Share link - 6P Part 2 on ethics of generative AI for music (123 words)
Share link - Inconvenient Principles (20 words)
End Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren't_gonna_need_it (YAGNI principle)