What Happens if You Have Open Hours to Talk to Your Site Visitors?

On the 24th of December, I wrote a post "Happy holidays. Let's have a Skype chat."

It's something I'd thought about doing for a while. Hey, why don't I take open hours to chat with people, and offer my take on anything a person is interested in. I've had a few other bloggers and website runners express curiosity with how it went, hence, this post -

The Good -

I connected with a lot of interesting people. In the guidelines to that post, I wrote "I blocked out 20 minutes for each call, so it might be a good idea to pick one or two things you’re working on or curious about before we get on the phone, because it could go fast" - most people did, in fact, have a couple items when they called, and we wound up covering a lot of interesting ground.

I wasn't sure how 20 minutes would work, but it worked surprisingly well. There was minimal chit-chat and how-are-ya's at the start, which is cool. I've never been a fan of smalltalk, and have always made an effort to move past it into interesting things as quickly as possible in real life.

A Simple, Yet Astoundingly Useful Self-Diagnostic Tool

"Energy   /Morale   /Health   /Creativity   /Intelligence   /Focus   ---Confusion   /Anxiety   /Restlessness"

There you go. That's my "Moment-by-Moment Ratings." Whenever I'm feeling off, I run through it. Here's earlier tonight:

--> Current rankings: Energy  6 /Morale  6 /Health  8 /Creativity 4  /Intelligence 5  /Focus 2  ---Confusion 2  /Anxiety 2  /Restlessness 9. Avg: 5.2 positive, 3 negative

It's on a 1 to 10 scale. I copy/paste the blank one, and fill it out. The six "Positive" categories relate to how energetic I feel, how motivated I feel and how I rank my morale and outlook in general, how healthy I feel at that moment, how creative I feel (in an innovating / inventing / "breaking new ground" way), and how smart I feel (more related to number-crunching and raw processing ability... I don't drink any more, but when I did -- three glasses of red wine might have taken my creativity up, and intelligence down).