Life update September 2024

Life has been hectic with projects and work, but it’s also been very good to me. If you read my last life update, linked here, you know essentially how my life is structured around routine, work, training and the time I have over for side projects, which isn’t that much unfortunately. But the whole purpose of me putting in work on my own projects, YouTube and the blog, is to build up the foundation that can allow me more time for doing exactly this. Because this is what I love doing.

A new side project

So for the past 6 months or so, I’ve been building a new service that is meant to become a product on it’s own. I’m building it for myself from the start, as it is a tool that helps me and my partner in our daily lives in a way I haven’t found in any other product. So no matter how many other people find it useful, it will remain truly valuable to me and my partner.

The trouble with building a side project for yourself first, and not thinking about other users, is mostly the things you don’t think about being obvious to you. Since you are the builder, you know exactly how the system works, you know the UI in and out, so every task you need to perform in the system is automatic for you. It won’t be for your users.

So you have to design the service from the perspective of a completely new and oblivious user, with onboarding flows, zero-data views etc. That is what will take up most of my time as I’m finishing up the first stable version of the service, which is only going to be 100% web based at the start. The goal is to then focus 100% on user feedback, build in feature requests as well as made fixes to features and flows to make them more user friendly.

Finally, if things go well, the idea is to then build a native app for at least macOS. It will be very similar to the web version of course, but with some adaptations to the UI to make it a little more pleasant to use as a desktop app. And, eventually, build it as an iOS app.

Why I’m starting with the web version, outside of it being faster to iterate with, is that the service itself, and the features, are much more catered to an administrative workflow on a larger screen. You are dealing with a lot of data as well as graphs and reports. But in the long run, the iOS app will provide the core functionality of daily or weekly activities that can make the work you do on the desktop version more focused on “power user” tasks.

I don’t want to share just yet what the project is, but that will come soon. The hope is that the feature set makes it unique enough of to warrant people to actually give it a valid chance. As I’ve said before, some of the greatest solutions we have are simply remixes of older existing solutions, made in a much better way. And that’s most of what innovation is really.

YouTube

The videos I’ve been putting up so far have gotten some good feedback. The coding video, naturally, got more views than the others, but I’m trying to not care so much about views and focus on making. I’m not completely ignorant of any metrics, since they do provide feedback in themselves, however I don’t want them to drive too much of what I actually produce.

The idea anyway in the end, is to be able to create things that actually produce value, which is why I don’t want to completely ignore the metrics. This is going to take a fair bit of time, considering I only have a limited amount of time each week to put into these things. But over time, I can find the right focus and hopefully build up a body of work that provides proper value.

Writing

The main writing I do is the daily articles that I share on Mondays every week, outside of the short texts I write every day and post on social media. The daily shorts are meant to keep me accountable on a daily basis to writing, and write in a short format to condense ideas or thoughts I have from week to week. These have proven to be much harder than the weekly articles, due to their short format and to the time frame I put myself in. I don’t write just one short text, but usually at least 5, and then choose the one that I deem the best out of those 5.

The weekly articles can be a little stressful as well due to how my life situation looks like with other interests and spending time with friends and my partner. But they are a really great way for me to put down into words whatever I have been thinking about lately, to better understand those thoughts, and hopefully provide something of value for you as a reader.

Looking back on my writing on Instagram I can clearly see I did write more back then, having a daily routine of writing texts of up to 2200 characters for each post. Sure, they weren’t all of the highest quality, but over time it’s about the body of work that you are able to produce. So with that said I am racking my brain on how to fit in more time for writing on a daily basis, so as to be able to contribute more to my body of work, and with that get better at writing. And there are two ideas I have about just how to do that.

Daily posts

Depending on which platform(s) I decide on for posting daily, not just the shorts but more long form, it can become less or more work for me to do. Posting on Instagram was a fair amount of work since I also took a photo with each text, and sometimes that photo was really hard to get right, and in time. Nowadays, I have much less time due to the nature of my work, to be able to sit down and do that work on a daily basis. But it is something I am considering.

Weekly posts

This is of course much less work compared to daily, and would enable me to focus more on quality than on quantity. From the perspective of time, that is much more beneficial. But from the perspective of producing quantity and contributing to a body of work, it’s less beneficial. It could of course be the first step to posting daily, but in the end what matters is that I actually somehow enjoy the work I do. Not all work you do on a daily basis can be something you enjoy, as part of our careers and roles do involve work that is not enjoyable. However what matters to me personally is that I enjoy the nature of the work I do, that is the overall tasks and results I produce through them.

Newsletter

This is something I’ve wanted to explore for so many years. It’s a classic among creators and makers and the go-to way people collect emails for either marketing or promotion. What I find so compelling about having a newsletter is not the actual collection of emails, but what I am able to produce each week. I don’t believe in the idea of just having a newsletter subscription that tosses out hollow crap that doesn’t have any form of value. If, or when, I produce a newsletter, it’s going to be from the foundation of providing information and resources that actually have value and substance to them.

So in essence, all these ideas stem from a drive to want to produce more and focus more on what I enjoy doing. While I do have many ideas, I still try to limit myself in en effort to avoid creating expectations and urgency in producing things I don’t enjoy. Since all of this is about me doing what I actually enjoy doing with my time, it would be directly counter to it’s main purpose to try and scale for the sake of scaling and with that ruin the enjoyment of it all.

Focus

So, to summarize this all, my focus currently is to be valuable at work and use that as a platform to grow. A career and the industry overall is not a bad place to gain experience and knowledge just because your ambition is to be your own boss. While I’m doing that, I’m working on freelance projects again with old clients to get back some movement in my business. And finally, building on my side project to hopefully be able to produce something of solid value that people want to use and be willing to pay for as well.

Life is one big opportunity to make something great, and that’s what I’m truly trying to do, while enjoying the process. Again, it’s not about enjoying every single minute of what you do every day. But about not wasting your life doing things you never like doing, for people you don’t respect, just to have enough money to live a life where you are trying to escape from your every day life. It is clearly possible to do work you enjoy, and make so much more than you would on a regular job, while working with people you love and respect and producing work you are proud of. That, in the end, is what my ambition is. And that, is what I’m focusing on.