This page is for making Zen Habits decisions. I'll publicly discuss or explain my decisions regarding Zen Habits here. Feel free to add your comments below - while I welcome public discourse, in the end I'll make all decisions about Zen Habits. (Also see: Zen Habits FAQ)

Radical Transparency

• 8/8/09: Decided to try the Radical Transparency experiment, to set an example for others, to allow the public to see into all decisions and communications. This will be a gradual transition -- this wiki is the start of it. Will see how this emerges. Would love to hear your thoughts! Comment below or on the Comments page. Read more or see the FAQ.
• 8/8/09: Asked Ryan Scott to look into creating apps to allow readers to vote on upcoming post ideas and potential guest writers. He's looking into it - will probably use Google appspot.

My New Book

• 8/8/09: Decided to put my new book online, as I draft it, to allow others to have input as I write, to help me make it better. Will create a Wordpress website soon. Read more.
• 8/8/09: Looking into Lime Daley to host the new book site.
• 8/9/09: Chose Lime Daley to host the new book site, created an acct, need to set up Wordpress and route my domain (focusmanifesto.com) to this account. Will pay $20/mo. for something more than a basic acct. Chose this host because of his personal service, recommended by my friend Glen. Update: Set up wordpress and routed domain. Now just need to add content.
• 8/10/09: Installed manifest wordpress theme, modified CSS to get the look I want, added some basic content - about page, author bio, uncopyright, etc - plus most of one chapter. Now need to add more content to finish first beta version. See new site: focusmanifesto.com.

Zen Habits comments

• Early 2009: Put in the do-follow plugin so that links to people's blogs in their comment names are no longer "nofollow" links (this will help increase my commenters' Google PageRank). Did this to help my fellow bloggers, but never announced it as I don't want to attract spam. Still, as I'm announcing all my decisions here, I thought I should let people know.
• Summer 2009: Closed comments for all posts older than 5 days. Did this to limit the horrendous number of comment spam that was flooding Zen Habits. Has mostly accomplished this, although it means only recent posts can get new comments. This was a compromise -- I was tired of dealing with spam for old posts, but I really want to hear from my readers in the comments.
• Upcoming decision: Want to make it a policy that you can't use your business or blog's name as your commenter name -- you need to use a real name (ala Jonathan Fields' comment policy). This is to stop all the spammy comments. I plan to implement this decision, but haven't figured out how to add this policy above the comment box, now that my blog is using Thesis. Would love to hear thoughts on this, as well as anyone with technical knowledge.

Zen Habits design

• Summer 2009: Decided to make my theme more minimalist. So I started fiddling with the CSS and php files of my existing theme, stripping away code and ads and links and color, and having only one post on my front page, until I came up with a pretty minimalist design. Still, it wasn't perfect -- needed to highlight past posts better. So I hired a designer.
• July 2009: Hired designer (Chama Inc.) to implement a well-designed minimalist theme. Has been implemented, it's the current design up on Zen Habits. Uses Thesis but with custom CSS and such.
• Upcoming decision: Want to make this theme Uncopyrighted, to allow others to download. Designer is working on creating files for people to download. Hope to implement this soon.

Zen Habits Ads

• April 2009: Decided to reduce my ads to one. First, this was because I was unhappy with spammy Google Adsense ads that I couldn't control, and had been wanting to eliminate these for at least a year but was worried about loss of income. Second, I just had too many ads and was unhappy with clutter, but again was worried about dropping my other ad networks (I was in 4 ad networks, including Adsense) and losing income. Finally decided that loss of income but having a minimalist design and ads I was happy with was the best route. Notified all ad networks of my decision and dropped them.
• Upcoming decision: Want to drop Google Adsense from my RSS feed (it's currently at the bottom of my feed) and sell my own ad there, but don't know how to do this with Feedburner. Suggestions welcome!

Write To Done

• Originally: Started Write To Done in 2008 after success of Zen Habits ... wanted to write about blogging and writing but couldn't really do that on ZH because it wasn't the right audience. So I started the 2nd blog with a minimalist theme, and wrote a bunch of posts. It was an instant success, in my eyes, because I got a good group of enthusiastic readers -- what any blogger wants!
• Later in 2008: I lost some of my enthusiasm for writing for WTD, mostly because I was busy with other projects but also because I don't always have something interesting to say about writing and blogging -- however, the blog suffered because of it. Mary Jaksch of Goodlife Zen, who had done a couple of WTD guest posts, offered to help, and we ended up forming a 50/50 partnership, with Mary taking over as Editor in Chief and basically running the blog. I write every week or two, and Mary and a great group of guest writers take up most of the load.
• July 2009: Mary made the great decision to drop almost all ads on WTD. Makes for a better reader experience.

Zen Family Habits

• 8/7/09: Sherri Kruger of Serene Journey blog proposed a sister site called Zen Family Habits with similar theme and posts as ZH but on family topics.
• 8/11/09: Leo and Sherri did Skype chat and both liked the idea and decided to proceed with project -- Sherri will take the lead and Leo will assist.
• 8/12/09: Leo created wiki page for Zen Family Habits -- Sherri can expand.

See also: Zen Habits FAQ.