Alright, it’s retro time!

I’m making a few changes in 2019, hopefully for the better.

1. The retro will now be monthly. This was already true but now I’m formalizing it. I’ll plan to get it out on the first Monday of the month, unless I’m on vacation in which case I’ll get it out when I get back (like today).
2. I’m bringing back the goal report card. Since I was already setting monthly goals I can now fold them back into the retro process.
3. I’m going to try to standardize the format. Time, revenue, goals, life. Boom. Let’s see how it goes.

Time

Time breakdown for December 2018

A short-ish month with < 100 work-hours logged, largely due to taking a bit of time off for the holidays and to take care of the baby. And within that bucket lots of Dimagi time.

Still, I made some decent progress on my new Django Starter Template project, with the other major time investment going to my year-in-review blog post which, as always, was a super-useful reflection exercise for me.

I think in a typical month I should be spending more time on Place Card Me and Build With Django but December is unique so I’m okay with this.

Revenue

Project	Revenue
Place Card Me	$2245
Chat Stats	$90
Build With Django	$0
Total	$2335

Place Card Me just beat out last month’s revenue record for another personal best.

Very late with my December update since I've been on vacation. 🌴

Just eeked out the best all time month for @placecardme in December

💰 $2245 revenue
⬆️ 3.5% monthly increase
✉️ 128,501 cards made
🕑 5 hours worked
👨‍💼 $449 hourly wage

Don't worry, January is going to be ugly.

— Cory Zue (@czue) January 9, 2019

All-in-all nothing too surprising here. As noted above, I expect a significant dip in January now that holiday-place-card-season is over.

December Goals

#	Goal	Grade
1	Establish a sustainable work/life rhythm	B
2	Write my year in review and plans for 2019	A
3	Make progress on Django SaaS Template	C

1. Rhythm mostly achieved, although I’m still not back up to working 40-hour weeks. That’ll be a goal for this month.
2. Done!
3. Made some progress, though only so much I could get done in 8.5 hours.

January Goals

1. Get back to 40-hour weeks by the end of month.
2. Spend 40% of time on personal projects.
3. Overhaul the Place Card Me landing page.
4. Make progress and set a launch date for the Django SaaS Template

At a meta-level I’m hoping to always have one major time-related goal, one major Place Card Me goal, and one Django goal per month. The rest will be wildcards.

Life

Holidays were great!

We did a great trip up the Garden Route over New Year’s and survived traveling with the baby.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cory Zue (@czue13) on Jan 6, 2019 at 9:40am PST

That’s all she wrote. See you in Feb!

—Cory