At the beginning of the yearI made the decision to publish Productivity Lost, originally intended as a book and then pitched as a series of contributed op-eds, as a standalone blog.

It wasn’t a decision I took likely as there were a number of other options available. In fact, I knew I was actively swimming against the tide to some extent, since blogs have largely gone by the wayside as publishers choose either to remain solely on social media or distribute new content as an email newsletter. But I was positive that a blog was the best idea and so I moved forward.

While I’m still happy with having taken this route – mostly because I still feel blogs are the best platform in that they contribute to the long-term health and viability of the open web, something that’s in grave danger – it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses.

In fact, from an objective point of view it’s been a resounding failure. The stats have been less than great in terms visitors to the Productivity Lost site.

That may be because of some factor like links not getting traction on social media.

That may be because the site is still too new for search engines to have assigned any value to.

That may be because my contrarian takes on topics that usually get much more peppy, self-help type coverage in other media just weren’t resonating with anyone.

Whatever the case, Productivity Lost is now complete. In total it came to 98 posts and 72,380 words. Not a bad effort, if I do say so myself.

If you were waiting until it was finished to jump in, I’ve updated the table of contents to make navigation as intuitive as possible, so you can read it all in order.

Though this didn’t turn out quite like I expected, I regret nothing. It’s better that it stands on its own instead of becoming a series on this blog. And I *still* believe links on the web are good for everyone, though in 2020 that may sound a tad naive. While the stats and metrics are such that, if I were my own client, I would be sounding a different tune, I’m just stubborn enough to believe that this was a good idea that just hasn’t been discovered yet.

I hope you agree.