Holy Cow! How did that happen?!?!?

byNumerous

1K followers

Updated 8 years ago

So I kind of have a weird sleep schedule. I'll write about that some other time, because it does relate to productivity and creativity, but for now the point is I went to sleep a couple hours ago and then woke up a little while ago to go back to work. I jumped on WA quick to see what was going on.

I had a blog post in my draft folder that it said would automatically post and didn't. I don't know if there was something I was supposed to do to make that happen, but I just posted it manually. I'm still trying to figure this all out. In fact, looking around just now I just found that you can restrict access to your blog posts. Something new to play with, but I digress.

So I'm looking around to see if there's anything else I should take note of and that's when I see it. My first reaction really was...

"Holy $***!!! How did that happen?!?!?"

When I went to sleep a couple hours ago my rank was like 700,000+ or something. I kept joking to myself that I had to be lowest ranked person on all of WA. But I figured oh well, it will go up eventually over time. Well boy did it ever. I wake up and I'm at 2403!!!

OK I realize to you old pros, that may not seem like a big deal, but I'm still trying to figure this whole thing out. First off I didn't know how often these rankings change. When it didn't get updated as I did things I was thinking maybe it was a weekly thing, but now I'm guessing it's a daily thing. Either that or this just happened to be the day the rankings were updated. Oh today's the 30th. (This won't post until Dec 1. New member limit.) Maybe, it's a monthly thing. I guess I'll find out.

I also didn't suspect such a huge jump. I expected consistent participation over time to slowly move me up the mountain. Instead, I get Superman, able to jump the whole mountain in a single bound.

OK well most of the mountain...

Or a good piece of it anyway...

Alright, fine, not really Superman at all. Whatever. :) My point is it was way more than I was expecting, but looking at the numbers now that's probably due more to a lack of understanding about how the system works. So by the numbers:

Helper rank: 2,042 Points: 89

Creator rank: 3,354 Points: 10

Activity rank: 1,788 Points: 141

Member rank: 2,403 Points: 240

So a couple things this tells me. First definitely not Superman. While my rank jumped a mountain, my total points are only 240. I don't know what is typical in your first day or any day, but that doesn't surprise me too much. You can only participate so much, especially when you're still trying to figure things out.

Creator points are only 10. Also doesn't surprise me. 3 month rule for new members. No creating training and only one blog post a day which I believe are basically everything you get creator points for.

Helper points and activity points kind of surprise me. I mean I was bouncing around and posting a lot yesterday, but when I first looked at the ranking system I thought those were the least likely places for me to get points.

I practically loath social networks. I have a running joke on Facebook where I renamed my birthday to I Get On Facebook day because that's almost the only day I ever post on it. And aside for business uses that's the only social network I use. So wasn't expecting a whole lot in the activity category.

Also I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a helpful person. I mean I'm more than happy to share what I know, but compared to people in my family that are all involved with charities and stuff it's not even close. And I frequently find myself being called on to help out people because I'm the tech guy and I freelance from home so I can drop everything at a moments notice when people have an emergency. But it's not like I go out of my way to find people to help. It just works out that way.

But I guess I should know by now that when you use technology to start tracking things, you never know what you might uncover. We'll see how it plays out long term, but still kind of interesting. Here's to learning something new every day.

Cheers

Edit 1:

OOOHHHH...just reread the notice. It says it "may be posted tomorrow!" not it "will be posted tomorrow!" So noted.

Edit 2:

Because of the time delay caused by one post per day, as I'm posting this I now know that apparently the rankings update daily around 11pm EST and my rank is now 1622.

Edit 3: I also just learned that the entire site must update around the same time the rankings do, because I was able to post after the rankings update which was before 24 hrs had passed since my last post. Good to know!