Jared Dees

Author. Speaker. Teacher.

February 2021 Project Report

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Here is my monthly report on projects, goals, and the lessons I learned along the way.

My 2021 Goals

Professional Goals:

486,554/1,000,000 words for kids (A part of my #1millionwordsforkids goal) (+27,597 words)

616/1,000 Resources (Videos/Worksheets) for Members of The Religion Teacher (+10 resources)

Personal Goals:

9/24 Books Read (+4 books)

33/73 Books of the Bible read from beginning to end (+0 books read)

15/100 30-minute workouts (+6 workouts)

How I Spent My Time in February 2021

I track every minute of time I spend working on projects using an app called Toggl (here is why). Here is a list of the top ten projects I spent the most time on last month:

  1. 18:38 – Formation5 Daily Email Newsletter
  2. 18:30 – The Religion Teacher Email & Customer Service
  3. 8:14 – Daily Review
  4. 6:46 – The Religion Teacher Membership Launch
  5. 6:19 – Morning Preview
  6. 5:54 – Psalm Stories
  7. 5:08 – Theoloji 101
  8. 4:25 – The Religion Teacher YouTube Videos
  9. 3:46 – The Religion Teacher Videos for Members
  10. 3:45 – Weekly Review 

Total Time: 109:32 Hours

February 2021 Highlights & Lessons Learned

Formation5 Newsletter Update

I completed the fourth month of daily Formation5 emails for parents. I knew it would be a large amount of my work time last month, but I did not expect it to be a full 18+ hours. I worked ahead writing all of the emails for the month of March and even into April and Easter Sunday.

Anytime a project takes such a large percentage of time, it has to be flagged for some evaluation.

Here is a quick 80/20 evaluation:

What 20% of the Formation5 emails and time led to 80% of the positive results?

20% Time = 80% Results

  • Word Count (towards 1,000,000 words for kids goal): Yes. About 80% of the words I wrote in February did come from this project. I qualify the emails as words for kids since parents read them to their children.
  • TRTm Resources Goal: No. I repurposed some of the member resources into the emails and used some of the emails as inspiration for member resources. There was crossover, but the Formation5 emails did not lead to 8 out of the 10 new tools.

20% Emails = 80% of Engagement

The emails with the most opens focused on feast days or questions. I saw this trend in the past months and it only continued in February and March. This says something about the focus that families want to have on faith formation. It would make sense for them to build the formation around feast days and I can certainly see this trend even in my own family life. A feast day or a season are great reasons to have a conversation about our faith.

So, the question is: Do I continue the daily Formation5 email?

During the Easter season, I am looking at shifting it from every day to just feast days, but it will take some more testing first.

The Religion Teacher Videos

We are doing some traveling in March, so I spent a lot of time working on recording new videos and creating graphic organizers for member videos ahead of time.

I am pleased with how these videos turned out. I had the camera only on the board to continue to test the response compared to my face actually being in the video. I found last month that there was a little bit of a lag between the audio and the video, so I plan to upgrade my camera very soon.

Here are two of the pre-recorded videos for March:

Theoloji 101

I had an idea floating around in my head for awhile:

Theology + Emojis = Theoloji 101

I finally acted up the idea and set a goal for my next book:

Write a theology book entirely with an iPhone and emojis.

I am using Twitter as the testing ground for the idea at: @theoloji101.

Here were the first few entries:

About Jared Dees

Jared Dees is passionate about sharing practical resources to teach faith. He is best known for his website The Religion Teacher and is the author of many books including 31 Days to Becoming a Better Religious Educator, Christ in the Classroom, and Beatitales: 80 Fables about the Beatitudes for Children.