Hey there, welcome to my weekly update for the week of 9th Jan - 15th Jan.
A lot of changes happened this week, I moved from Mumbai back to Ahmedabad and attended the first lectures of the winter semester. The first week of January turned out to be very productive and I was trying to replicate that in this week too.
But, I could not do it.
One of my goals in 2023 is to ship something every week, and I had planned that after working on the career crowding simulation in the first week, I would start working on some other idea and publish it towards the end of this week. This did not work out well. The first thing I learnt was that I am not a factory, who can just sit and write code. the second thing is that, it is much more advantageous to work on one product which is well designed with a lot of features rather than working on 10 different half-baked products.
So I have decided to give more two weeks for building the simulation, and then I can hopefully come out with the version two of the app.
Building something is tough, at the start there is a lot of enthusiasm, but as the project evolves, complexity increases and the only question that bother’s me is “why does this even matter?“. “Why am I wasting my time on something no one will ever use?“. Usually the answer to this question is “atleast I will get to learn something”. But this answer is also not enough. I tried to search the answer to this question in books and podcast and then I figured that I have to feel the fear and do it anyway.
Another one of my goals was to write daily, well I have been writing daily, but I have not been publishing daily, this has to change, I have to stick to a publishing schedule and make sure that I publish atleast two times a week.
In terms of fitness, this week was good. I ran 27.5 kms this week and did some of the most challenging runs I have ever done. Have to thank my body for that.
The Plan for next week.
Now that I know what I want to work on in this week, its time to step up a notch and make more time for deep work this week.
- Shipping the version 2 of the simulation.
- Shipping two blog posts (monday and thursday).
- Shipping a youtube video.
- keeping up with college and doing all the required reading before class.
- complete two weeks of the front-end developer capstone project.
- keep up with the design bootcamp.
- Run as intended along with two-three full body workout sesh.
This is an ambitious plan, and I am pretty sure I won’t be able to achieve all of them, but it’s good to set high goals and work towards them.
The system I am setting to achieve these goals are
- Do 30 mins of writing in the morning routine, followed by a run.
- Three hours of deep work session in the morning for coding and working towards the v2 .
- Rest of the morning time, before the class would be used for studying for college and doing other work.
- After college, it time either to get back to building the v2 or working on the courses I am taking.
- reading before sleep and maybe preparing the outline for future blog posts.
This week I have to be more defensive of my time and try to avoid places with distractions. Even if I am focused, working at a place full of distractions is a recipe for sub-optimal work. So lets defend our time and energy and work towards achieving the weekly goals.
Until next time, Pushkar Singh