At the start of each month I do a review in my journal of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. In January 2015 I started publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. You can see them all in my monthly reviews category.

WHAT DID I COMPLETE THAT I AM PROUD OF IN APRIL?

I used to have a jailbreak tweak on my phone similar to Launcher, that let me launch apps by pulling down on my screen, no matter what else I was doing on my phone. I had another one that let me add links to my read later accounts from anywhere on my phone. These days I use Polus to launch apps from my Control Center anytime I like.

I love the ability to access useful shortcuts from anywhere. This is why I use Alfred on my Mac constantly.

A few months ago I tried using TeuxDeux to plan out my week. I mentioned my process in my post about the tools I use to keep my content work organised.

One of the things that bothered me about TeuxDeux was that I had to manually enter my calendar events per day, so it was easy to miss them sometimes. Plus, it was just extra work to take events from my calendar and enter them somewhere else.

I read the internet a lot. That’s right, the whole thing.

Well, I try to read the whole thing and I usually end up disheartened by how much faster my reading queue builds up compared to how much of it I read. Still, I do my best.

This article first appeared in an issue of The List, my short-lived premium newsletter for content marketers.

Think about the blogs you admire and respect; the blogs you subscribe to or visit often. What makes you keep coming back?

At the start of each month I do a review in my journal of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. In January 2015 I started publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. You can see them all in my monthly reviews category.

WHAT DID I COMPLETE THAT I AM PROUD OF IN MARCH?

I've tried tracking my expenses before, and for a while I was happy using Cost, which is perhaps the only expense tracker I've found that shows you your remaining balance, rather than your total expenses or remaining budget. When I worked out what I spent the most money on and where I could cut back I stopped tracking my expenses altogether, since it had served its purpose.

I listen to a lot of podcasts.

In fact, the app that's using the most storage on my phone right now is a podcast player.

This article first appeared in an issue of The List, my short-lived premium newsletter for content marketers.

When you look at stories that are popular on The New York Times or articles that hit the front page of Hacker News, or even just the blog posts that spread like wildfire on Twitter until you've seen them twelve times in two days, the thing they have in common is that they stand out. They're unique stories, well told. Or they're stories that speak to all of us in some way, well told. Or they tell us all how to do something we've been wondering about.

At the start of each month I do a review in my journal of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. In January 2015 I started publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. I hope you'll find them useful and/or entertaining.

WHAT DID I COMPLETE THAT I AM PROUD OF IN FEBRUARY?

This article first appeared in an issue of The List, my short-lived premium newsletter for content marketers.

How do you find time to keep up with your writing schedule? You've got a million other things to do, and writing is so easy to push aside until later... only later never comes, and suddenly you're struggling to publish regularly.

This article first appeared in an issue of The List, my short-lived premium newsletter for content marketers.

I've been in an ideas drought lately. It's a tough place to be when you have a regular schedule to stick to—like a newspaper cartoonist or columnist who has no ideas but has to create something new every day anyway.

I write a lot. Between my own blog and newsletter, the Exist blog, guest posts, and newsletter, and my client work, that's a lot of writing to keep track of.

I recently created a system to help me keep track of my writing and make sure I'm focused on the right piece at the right time. If you want to try this yourself, here's what you'll need:

At the start of each month I do a review in my Day One journal of my goals, habits, and experiments from the past month. During January 2015 I started using my @bellebethcooper Twitter account to share public logs of everything I get done each day. To continue the trend of being open about what I'm up to, I wanted to try publishing my monthly reviews on my blog instead of keeping them private. I hope you'll find them useful and/or entertaining.

Around the start of 2014, I came across a jailbreak tweak that lets you add links to your reading list (Instapaper, Readability, etc.) from anywhere on your phone. In Safari, in Chrome, in Reddit apps. It worked like iOS 8 extensions, before they were a thing.

I wanted this tweak really badly. I started googling to see what else I could get for a jailbroken phone and found more tweaks that I loved: hiding unnecessary controls in Control Centre, hiding unnecessary icons in the status bar, making animations faster in iOS 7.

Federico Viticci writes a set of posts for MacStories at the end of each year that I always enjoy reading: his must-have iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps for the year (though this year he's doing iPhone and iPad only). Reading through this year's iPad post I realised how different my own list of favourite apps is, and decided to share my own list of must-haves.

A couple of months ago I wrote about my new brand experiment. I wanted to have a clear focus for my personal brand and to be more consistent in my output. I decided to focus on content marketing for startups. I started writing one post on this blog every week, set up The List (a premium monthly newsletter full of advice and tips for content marketers), and focused my Twitter account on content marketing and startups.

I'm on a never-ending quest to find the best ways to keep myself on-track and efficient. As such, I'm constantly experimenting with different workflows or methods of organisation. Recently I've developed a setup that's working really well. Here's what it involves.

Analogue and digital

I've been struggling with networking for a while now. I wrote a post a few months ago where I mentioned some of the things I was struggling with, one being the feeling of networking being like a game or a competition. Apart from this, I've also felt that meeting up with people without asking them for anything—a much more relaxed, friendly style of networking—is hard to get right. While I like this idea in theory, I'm still trying to work out the best way to go about it.

In the past year I've become more aware of the gender inequality in the tech industry, and the discrimination and abuse some women have encountered working in tech. I want to help improve this situation and I'm heartened by the brave people throughout the industry who are willing to take a stand against discrimination in our field—against anyone.

The more I read about the deplorable behaviour some women have put up with or spoken out against, the more I've tried to work out why I haven't come in contact with anything similar. My best guess is that I've simply been lucky so far. Then again, it could be that I have been treated in a sexist way but it's been vague enough that I've just been oblivious to it.