I use these posts as part of my effort to build in public. They showcase my current progress on products and audience building. They are intended to provide an imperfect snapshot of what I am working on and progress towards goals. If nothing else, they are useful to me for record keeping.
Overview
Most of the work I put in last week in relation to indie hacking supported being able to go solidly offline for a few days. Last week was a vacation week and it was sorely needed. My wife and I took a trip down to Palm Springs to celebrate our baby moon (cringing as I am typing that phrase out). We did not get to do a proper honey moon after our wedding due to Covid and it is likely going to be a while before we get to do another trip just the two of us with a little one on the way.
Writing this on Monday night listening to the new Harmony Wood's album I feel thoroughly refreshed. This weeks update has more of a philosophical bent as I did a lot of mental gymnastics in prioritizing what I want to work on in the coming weeks (it is hard!).
Irons in the Fire This Week
- Developing new "Postcards" music newsletter
- Mapbox and React Deep Dives series
- Mapbox Developers Handbook
- Strategy
Metrics
Making just about everything transparent and accessible.
- You can check out the Growth Dashboard I mentioned below
Here are the things I worked on during the last week.
Strategy
Prioritizing what to work has been a challenge over the past month. The list of side projects that I would like to focus on continue to grows while the amount of time I have available remains the same (hardly a unique problem). As such, a lot of my energy as of late has been focused on strategy and making clear plans of actions and timelines for the various irons I have in the fire.
This led me to reflecting a lot on how I managed time in the past and eventually led me to reflecting on my time as a high school and collegiate athlete. I realized that it was a time that is not all that dissimilar to where I am at now. Going to class is analogous to my day job and cross country/track are analogous to my side projects. I had goals for both and had to learn how to set and them for each aspect of my life.
A large part of setting goals for cross country and track involved setting short, medium, long, and extra long term goals. My freshmen year I wanted to be an all american by the time I graduated (unfortunately didn't happen). It was a massive goal and something that needed to get broken down into smaller goals to allow me to have any shot at accomplishing it. So I set long term goals like qualify for nationals this year, medium term goals like place top 10 at the conference meet, and short term goals like place top 5 in the race this coming weekend.
There is so much in this approach and breaking work down into the concept of seasons like you have in athletics that extends itself to building products. A big part in achieving my athletic goals was developing a training plan(s) for each season. The training plan blended a variety of workout types (regular aerobic runs, speed work, tempo runs, race simulations, and long runs) to get me in the shape I needed to be in to have a realistic shot at accomplishing my goals. They work really well.
I'm the middle of this trying this out, but I think the idea of developing training plans for indie hacking could work really well. More on this in the coming weeks though...
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