I’ve been idly thinking about how to continue to make this retro process more valuable to myself for a while now. Now that’s a New Year, it feels like a good time to try some changes.

A few things I’ve realized:

1. Weekly numbers for Place Card Me are no longer that interesting to me.
2. My self-driven time—what is controllable by me—is only about 25% of my time. This means that the amount of time I used to have available in a week now takes a month to accumulate.
3. I think, at least partly due to (2), my goals are turning into todo lists instead of high-level deliberate plans.
4. I don’t get a lot of value from this process with respect to my freelance and Dimagi work.

Still, I like the process of reviewing my time weekly, and tracking progress towards goals.

So I’m going to make the following changes this month and see how it goes:

1. Place card stats will be reported monthly
2. Goals will be set monthly and I’ll try and do it publicly up front. Goal progress will continue be tracked weekly, and I reserve the right to add/remove/change monthly goals at any time.
3. I’ll largely stop talking about freelancing and Dimagi here.
4. Time and life will more or less stay the same, for now.

Let’s see how it goes.

Place Card Stats

Closed out December with $582 revenue for the month and $999 revenue for the year. The screenshot below was taken on the 2nd where I’ve passed the $1k milestone.

There is a bug in my dashboard that is showing January on the left. Stupid years.

I think January will be a very important and telling month for the predicted future revenue of Place Card Me. Now that the holidays are over I expect the overall volume of traffic and sales to drop, but I don’t know how significant that drop will be. This will be the month where I find out if $500 / month is readily achievable or wildly unrealistic!

Time

This is the last two weeks of time.

Week 41 time breakdown

Was an outdoors-heavy couple weeks with multiple long hikes and surfs. The main focus of the past two weeks was writing my 2017 year-in-review, which was fun and rewarding but took a looooong time.

Goal Report Card

Final goals of 2017! As mentioned at the top I’m focusing just on self-driven stuff.

#	Project / Area	Goal	Grade
1	High level	Think about high level direction/goals	B+
2	Writing	Year in review	A

Comments

1. Spent some time thinking about my 2018 goals and plans. Need to put them together more coherently though.
2. Year in review is shipped. I got a lot of really positive input from my personal network on it which is always super-rewarding.

Upcoming

As I mentioned at the top, I’m going to try and set monthly goals instead of weekly and see how that goes.

That said, I haven’t quite figured those goals out yet this week, so I’ll report back on this next week. My main goal for the week is to finalize goals for 2018 in general, and then January. I’ll probably try to write them up in a short standalone post.

Life

We did an awesome hike up Table Mountain called Constantia Corner that was right next to a route I’d been up and down several times before. I had no idea this other route was there.

Also surfed a bunch and celebrated New Year’s with some friends. Overall it was a great staycation!

Here’s my year in review, according to Instagram:

A post shared by Cory Zue (@czue13) on Jan 1, 2018 at 7:13am PST

—Cory