A Kettle, a Checklist and Twenty Minutes: My Sunday Night Site Sweep

Sunday, 9:40pm. The kettle's on, the washing-up's draining, and there's a tab open with the ChrisJM admin panel blinking at me. This is the least glamorous hour of my week and, honestly, one of the most useful.

I don't do relaunches. I've tried. Twice I cleared a whole weekend to "rebuild the thing properly", and twice I got about as far as a fresh colour palette and a broken navigation before Monday arrived and real work took over. What actually keeps this site breathing is a small ritual: twenty minutes, four jobs, and no ambition beyond leaving it slightly better than I found it.

Why Sunday, and Why So Small

Monday morning is a terrible time to discover your portfolio has a dead link in it. Sunday night is a good time, because you're already in a slightly melancholy tidying mood and nobody is emailing you.

The other reason is that tiny upkeep suits people like me. I'm one person with a day job, a pile of unfinished projects and a memory like a colander. A big relaunch needs a fortnight of uninterrupted focus that I simply don't have. Twenty minutes on a Sunday, though? That I can protect. And the maths is daft but reassuring: four small jobs a week is over two hundred improvements a year, which is far more than any relaunch has ever given me.

The Four Jobs, and Nothing Else

There are exactly four. I'm strict about this, because the moment I allow a fifth the twenty minutes becomes ninety and the whole thing collapses.

1. Fix one broken link

Just one. I run a quick crawl, see what's broken, and repair whichever is most embarrassing. Usually it's a link to something I wrote back in 2023 that I've since renamed, or a "coming soon" project page that never came. Last week's was a link to a mate's portfolio that had moved to a new domain — two minutes to sort, and now his site gets my visitors instead of a 404.

One a week sounds glacial. It is glacial. It's also finite, which is precisely why it actually happens.

2. Prune one draft

My drafts folder behaves like a kitchen drawer. Every Sunday I open it, read one thing I started and abandoned, and make a decision: publish, park or delete. No "I'll come back to this". That phrase is where drafts go to die.

Most weeks I delete. That's fine. A draft nobody finishes isn't a project, it's a small guilt you carry around, and my guilt drawer had got heavy enough to warp the runners.

3. Time one page-load

I pick whichever page I suspect is slowest and time it properly — not on my laptop with fibre and nothing else running, but on my phone with a patchy signal, which is how most people will actually see it. If it's past three seconds on a middling connection, I go and find out why. Nine times out of ten it's an image that's 4MB when it should be 200KB, because I cannot be trusted with a camera.

This is the job I skip most often and the one I regret skipping. It's also the only one where the fix tends to be a single, satisfying line of change.

4. Publish one note

Not an article. A note. A paragraph, a photo, something I noticed on the walk back from the shop. It goes up as-is, spelling checked, with no further agonising. The point isn't to build an audience — it's to remind the site that it's alive. A personal site with nothing new on it for four months looks abandoned, and visitors can smell it through the screen.

The Checklist You Can Steal

If you run your own corner of the web, here's the whole thing in a form you can paste into a notes app:

• Links: one broken link found and fixed
• Drafts: one read, then published, parked or binned
• Speed: one page timed on mobile data
• Content: one note up, spelling checked
• Shut the laptop. That's it. No redesign.

Add a fifth job if it genuinely helps. Don't add six. Six is how the ritual turns into a second job you don't get paid for.

What This Isn't

It isn't a strategy. There's no content calendar, no keyword research, no funnel. I'm not trying to grow ChrisJM into a media empire; I'm trying to keep it somewhere I'd be happy to invite someone in.

It also isn't a substitute for the occasional bigger job. Twice a year I still block out an afternoon for the scary stuff — update whatever needs updating, rejig the navigation, delete a section that's outlived its purpose. But those afternoons only happen because the small stuff is already handled, so they don't get eaten alive by a broken link and a 4MB photo of a canal.

The Bit Nobody Mentions

The real benefit isn't the fixed links. It's that on Sunday night I sit down knowing exactly what I'm doing for twenty minutes, and on Monday morning the site is a fraction less embarrassing than it was. That's the whole pitch. No relaunch, no big reveal, no "exciting news coming soon" banner that stays up for a year and a half.

The kettle's boiled. I've got four jobs to do and one of them is a note about a heron I saw by the towpath. See you next Sunday.