So, I resigned myself to give up swearing with the same conviction that I used in determining that no matter what I attempted to give up, I would fail. I asked myself, what would motivate me to use shucks instead of... well... you know. How could I retrain myself not to spew vulgar language every time my computer bombs. Fine myself. That’s right. Every time I swear, the first person in the room to reprimand me gets a buck. And yes, it’s been an expensive first five days, but believe me, it’s definitely working. I figured that the more people I told I was trying to “quit” the faster I would achieve my goal, or go broke. Talk to me in February, or look for me at the Bethesda Mission :-)

Does anyone care if I talk about our website again? Anyone? Good. Did I ever tell you how personally amazed I am at the popularity of MODE’s website? Our last week’s statistic, the week before Christmas, MODEweekly.com, (formerly MODEmagazine.com) received over 21,000 hits. Twenty-one thousand hits in one week. My first question is who are all these people, and don’t they have anything better to do? In actuality 21,000 hits doesn’t seem so impressive when you understand the convention of the term “hit”. You see, a hit means anytime an individual browsing your website clicks on something. In reality, (reality is one of those things our Internet Service Provider InfoQuest Technologies sends us in the form of a 27 page weekly report), the number of successful visitors to our site that week was a little over 1,700. Now, those 1,700 folk rang up 21,000 hits by clicking all over our site. That’s still pretty impressive.

The moral of this story is , when someone tells you their site averages 10,000 hits a week, or 2,000 hits a day, ask them how many actual user sessions that was. It should calm them down a bit. Reality is so concrete.

All right, enough about the Internet already. Sheeesh. (See how I didn’t swear).

Let’s talk about National Clean Off Your Desk Day, which is Monday, January 12th. I want to talk about this because my desk has got to be the epitome of where the dumpster exploded. But my mess is bonafied-ably justifiable. You see, I suffer from a rare condition called “out of sight, out of mind”. In young children it’s also referred to as lack of “permanence”. You know the drill, hold a cookie in front of a young child and they will reach for it. Put a napkin over it, while it’s still within reach, and the child forgets its there. They have not yet developed permanence. Well, if it’s not on my desk, where I can put my hands on it, it doesn’t exist, and no fancy filing system will ever change that. At least I don’t think one will.

Anyway, in this issue we have several articles addressing self improvement. Some deal with business, some don’t. One deals with getting organized. When we embarked on this journey, it amazed us (me) how really organized some people can really be. I was envious. I want to be organized to. So to foster my own selfish desires, MODE is having a contest. You’ll have to visit our website to enter. Go to www.MODEweekly.com/CoolStuff and look for the Day Runner “Get Organized” promotion. We’re giving away 20 Day Runner Personal Organizers for the best suggestions, tips, tricks and techniques submitted during the promotion. Hope you’ll share your ideas. The winners’ suggestions will be posted for everyone to enjoy and benefit from.

Hope the New Year treats you better than the old one. Cheers!