Week 21 Retrospective

Back in the game!

A bit late with the retro today because I spent the morning coordinating the product hunt launch of Photos New Tab. Still too early to say whether it will get traction, but I’m glad to finally have it done with!

In other news, I feel like had my most productive week in ages. I was able to balance all my freelancing engagements and still be very strategic and productive with my personal/sabbatical time. Will run through this in the goal section.

Goal Report Card

Finally getting good grades again!

# Project / Area Goal Grade
1 Chrome Extension Product Hunt Follow Up A+
2 Place cards Spin up affiliate program, more designs, spec out Etsy workflow, if easy, build A+
3 Writing Next thing drafted B
4 Make / Ship Stuff Hypothetical skill A
5 Generate Revenue Continue pushing / working on freelancing engagements A

Comments

  1. Like I mentioned, followed up and submitted on Product Hunt this morning. Also made some updates to make sharing and saving photos easier.
  2. Planning to pilot an affiliate program with Budget Savvy Bride, added three more designs, and am listed on Etsy! Next week I plan to expand the Etsy listings. I’m also going to try and add three designs per week indefinitely since it takes me less than an hour and seems like a good way to organically make the product better over time.
  3. The only goal I kind of missed on. I did draft something for Dimagi’s CommCare Zapier integration which isn’t exactly what I intended to do with this goal, but I am mostly counting.
  4. Working with some friends over at Daily Hypothetical to build some bots that integrate with their podcast feed. Got to dive into the world of api.ai, slack bots and Google Assistant skills and have a pretty decent prototype up and running already.
  5. Still finding juggling four freelancing engagements a bit stressful, but have been able to spend about half my time on them and I believe that so far everything continues to go well. At least nobody has complained to me yet….

Time

Here was my planned allocation:

Project Time ~Hours / Week
Chrome Extension 5% 2
Place Cards 20% 8
Writing 20% 8
Make/Ship Stuff 10% 4
Generate Revenue 45% 18

Versus the actuals:

Week 21 time breakdown

Week 21 time breakdown

Overall this was one of my best weeks in terms of hitting my planned time allocation. I think that having the commitments on the freelancing side forces me to be more deliberate with the time I spend outside of it, which in turn makes me more focused and productive.

This coming week I’m planning on taking most of Wednesday - Friday off, so will probably accomplish very little.

Life

Spent the week in Toronto eating great food and hanging out with my wife Rowena’s family.

A post shared by Cory Zue (@czue13) on

Back in Boston now and excited for a big friends trip to Vermont this coming weekend.

—Cory