Sorry to miss you last week, but we have some news…

I’ve been sending the newsletter out for six months now. I’ve been able to look at some data showing how people interact with each issue, and I’ve got some really interesting feedback from subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Here’s what I’ve learned:

The most time consuming bit of each issue is reading, collating and selecting articles to link to. Even taking into account some inaccuracy in the data, readers don’t tend to click on the links on their first or subsequent visits.

I don’t know what I’m going to write about on a week to week basis, you don’t know what you’re going to read on a week to week basis. Generating ideas can be pretty difficult, and has led to some, er, pretty thinly researched issues.

I’ve been able to generate and publish some (occasionally, quite well received) articles based on my out loud thinking here, but they’ve been a bit rushed and not particularly well edited. I think I’d really benefit from spending a bit more time on research and rewriting.

While I’ve been considering that, I’ve also been preparing for this:

…which is based on an idea I first explored here last year, but also looks at how we might experiment at work to get better results. (This talk is on Wednesday 9th March at 11.30, by the way. You can sign up here if you like, but I’ll likely share the clip at a later date too. I’ll be there doing a Q&A but the presentation itself is pre-recorded. I’ve retained authenticity by umming and erring quite a lot and getting a couple of bits wrong.)

1) I’m changing the send frequency to fortnightly on a Tuesday instead of weekly on a Monday. This should give me the chance to make the writing a bit better, and will hopefully remove the Sunday night homework crisis this way of working seems to have reintroduced from my teenage years.

2) I’m not going to worry about linking to articles in the newsletter. But, I’ll continue to save things that I find interesting, together with everything I’ve considered previously for inclusion, here.

I will never know if you read them or not, and the mystery is obviously hugely exciting.

3) I’m changing the platform I use to send the newsletter out from Revue to Substack. Apart from how it looks, this won’t make any difference to you - I’ll bring the past issues across, and subscriptions will just continue. Revue seems more suited to writers trying to monetise their newsletters, and I don’t see that being a direction I go in.

4) I’m going to focus the content newsletter on experiments to make work better, on a personal level, and for teams. I think this gives me a framework to explore some interesting ideas, but also the outcomes of those ideas in the real world. As the current title won’t make too much sense, it will now be called:

Thank you for supporting The Week In Pieces, and special thanks to those of you who have shared it around. You’ll get your first issue of the new newsletter on Tuesday 8th March. I hope you like it.

See you then,

Piers