Suddenly there’s only two months left in the sabbatical! I’m finding myself starting to shift a bit into into “oh shit” mode in terms of making the most of the time and experience.

Partly in response to that, I spent some time this week thinking about my top-line goals for the rest of the sabbatical, and came up with three:

1. Determine the feasibility of not having a steady, salaried job
2. Determine whether I like not having a steady, salaried job (that is feasible)
3. Decide what happens in September

So hoping to direct much of my efforts in the direction of at least one of these three goals.

I also attempted to be more deliberate about my time up front this week. I pulled out what I’m currently doing into top-level projects and then allocated effort according to what I felt was aligned with my priorities. Here’s what that looks like:

Project	Time	~Hours / Week
Chrome Extension	10%	4
Place Cards	10%	4
Writing	20%	8
Django	20%	8
Make / Ship Stuff	20%	8
Generate Revenue	20%	8

Goal Report Card

Another mixed and somewhat ugly week, goal-wise. Again, I tried to set goals for each project based on the allocation above.

#	Project / Area	Goal	Grade
1	High Level	High level goals for rest of the sabbatical	A
2	Chrome Extension	1 Outreach / marketing effort	C
3	Place cards	Content tweaks, maintenance	A
4	Writing	1 blog	F
5	Django	First Blog	F
6	Make / Ship Stuff	Django site	F
7	Generate Revenue	Playlogix + keep balls in air	A

Comments

1. Did spend a fair amount of time thinking about this and found it useful.
2. Posted on indie hackers looking for ideas, but didn’t get much out of it.
3. Lot of bug reports and support requests on placecard.me this week. Fun to have that happen while not running ads, but also disruptive.
4. Drafted something, but still having a hard time shipping writing.
5. Started and stopped a few different things related to this, but totally failed at writing a coding blog
6. Had the idea that I’d make a new site about building django apps using django. But then bailed on that idea mid-week. As a result I don’t have anything shipped. :(
7. Handed off my Playlogix work and have 3 or 4 other projects/conversations in various stages of development. The outreach I did about six weeks ago is finally starting to pay off.

Time

Week 16 time breakdown

Overall quite a lot more time spent on the “revenue generation” (contract work and freelancing) categories element than my 20% allocation above. Django and place cards look pretty good. Writing is low.

Generally there’s a pretty clear correlation between timespend and the goal report card which makes intuitive sense.

Also I started tracking all of my physical/mental health activities and not just weekday ones, so that number has gone up a bit.

Life

Had another great weekend. We traveled up the coast to Hermanus, a town famous for having the “best land-based whale-watching in the world”. Unfortunately it’s a bit early in the season for whales, but we still took in some great food, great views, and got to explore another part of the region.

In other news, we celebrated America’s birthday with a good old-fashioned 4th of July barbecue (the one time a year it’s acceptable to call it that in this country) with some friends.

A post shared by Cory Zue (@czue13) on Jul 4, 2017 at 11:05am PDT

—Cory