Some people think that New Year's resolutions are stupid, but I really like them. It's good to take stock of what you're doing once in a while, and assess if you're doing the right things. I've gotten off to a slightly earlier start to this in 2016 (because can't 2016 be over already?), and have been assessing a few things in my life.

First on the block are my web projects. These take up a good amount of my time, and 2016 was nothing if not a prolific year for me. In 2016 I produced:

• 324 posts to BirchTree (this very site!)
• Launched Today Weather
• Launched QuickBinLookup
• Launched and closed App Bottle Rocket
• 12 (final) episodes of Bite Size Tech

It's been a big year, and the number of people who read my blog and used these services exceeds 500,000 people in 2016. That's absolutely staggering to me, and exceeds what I ever thought this whole blogging thing would ever turn into.

2016 was also the year I found my niche in the tech blogging world. I'm the Apple Watch guy, and that niche has been good. I spent some of 2015 trying to be an "iPad is my main computer" guy, but I found it was easier, and better to be the niche that you naturally fall into. Besides, I'm never going to catch up to Federico Viticci on that!

I'm very proud of the work I've done online in 2016, but the theme of 2017 is going to be focus.

Focus is hard.

I know myself, and I know I'm not good at focusing. I love to do a lot of things all at once. I don't like to choose just a few things when there's the option of doing a lot of things. I hope to change this in 2017.

That means a lot of things, but for BirchTree it means fewer posts than before. I wrote 324 pieces in 2016 over 345 days. That's basically 1 per day, but maybe that's too much. Looking at my stats, almost half of my views are on the 10 most popular posts this year, which is kind of insane, but speaks to quality over quantity.

It's not technically 2017 yet, but I'm going to start my new year's resolution for the blog right now. Anticipate seeing fewer, but more substantial pieces on the site starting...........now!

A part of me wanted to title this post "I'm ending the blog" but resisted the clickbait headline.