It really felt like just last week that I was sitting around in a post-New Year’s state of zen and
musing about all the remarkable things that I’d accomplish in my first month of 2018.
Fast-forward four weeks and here we are at the end of the month with me accomplishing basically
half of what I set out to do at the beginning of the month.
Still, I believe my output has been an appropriate reflection of my priorities and I’m happy with
where I am, even if it’s not where I had hoped to be on January 1.
Ladies and gentleman, I have once again been bit by Hofstadter’s Law!
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
I’ll try to remember this lesson when I set my February goals this week, though something tells me
there’s a good chance this is just going to happen again…
Time
Week 45 time breakdown
Hovering right around 40 hours again this week with about 16 of those hours self-directed—almost
100% focused on getting something out the door on this Django site.
Main accomplishments:
- Redid the Build With Django landing page.
- Created a celery progress bar demo page.
- Ported the wedding website blog over to
Build With Django (and built a little blog framework in the process that I can reuse).
- Started the process of open-sourcing another little Django library to handle site metadata.
- Minor work on my drought site and doing some planning for Day Zero in the process.
Goal Report Card
Update on my January goals and progress towards them, broken down by area.
Info Product
Overall status: 97% complete
- Nail down what the topic would be
- Make a landing page for it
- Ship a blog post on the topic
I think I’m going to start promoting celery progress
today at which point I will call this done.
B2B SaaS
Overall status: Completely Failed
- Come up with at least three B2B SaaS ideas
- Do a market/viability assessment of each of them
This goal has failed. I am also removing it from my monthly goals indefinitely.
I just can’t seem to get motivated to work on something B2B, and I’m just going to follow my gut on that.
My new plan is to defer this goal until something organically comes up that actually motivates me to start pursuing
it, and if that doesn’t happen then I won’t ever touch it again.
If my only goal was to earn money then giving B2B up would probably be a bad idea, but thankfully I’ve decided
that money is a second or third-order priority and so I’m fine with this plan.
B2C SaaS
Overall status: Failed
- Formulate a plan to test whether Chat Stats has any revenue potential
I ran out of time and also failed this goal.
I will be changing this goal for February, though am hoping to still do some work on Chat Stats in the future.
Place Card Me
Overall status: Done
- Look at pricing/analytics data for January and adjust prices based on it
- Start collecting data to drive the product roadmap.
I hit my monthly goals for Place Card Me several weeks ago and have been coasting ever since.
I’m excited to put a new round of goals in place for February and start working on the product again!
Passion Project(s)
Overall status: Done
- Start figuring out what I might want to do (first) for reasons that aren’t financially driven
Still going to be focusing on the drought project for as long as it’s a crisis and I think I can add value.
Upcoming
Main focus for next week:
- Promote
celery-progress and Build With Django a bit.
- Plan my February and come up with my February goals
- Write up and send out a newsletter/update on what I’ve been up to
Life
Seems like all of the sudden, everyone’s talking about the water crisis in Cape Town.
Spent the weekend planning things like greywater storage, looking into non-water-based toilets,
and stocking up on drinking water, just in case.
Also managed to catch the first round of Red Bull’s King of the Air
kite surfing competition, which was incredible to see.
Happy (almost) February!
—Cory