The Break

September 2022 Retrospective

Two months ago I signed off my retro with a list of questions about my upcoming trip overseas:

  • How “passive” is my passive income, really?
  • Will I be able to keep my new hire productive while I’m traveling?
  • With my new hire’s help, will I be able to ship Pegasus releases with minimal effort?
  • Do I actually love my kids—who are 1 and 3—when forced to spend all my time with them?

Now that the trip is done, I have answers!

Q: How “passive” is my passive income, really?

A: Pretty passive!

Here are the numbers for August (averaged ~10 hours of work a week):

Project Profit Monthly Change
SaaS Pegasus $3324.59 -26.18%
Place Card Me $1804.86 28.00%
Chat Stats $94.10 -41.18%
Total $5223.55 -14.00%

And September (~5 hours / week):

Project Profit Monthly Change
SaaS Pegasus $6518.11 96.06%
Place Card Me $1542.67 -14.53%
Chat Stats $112.92 20.00%
Total $8173.70 56.48%

There’s no obvious change in trends from other months, proving that—at least for stints of a couple months—my income is pretty decoupled from my effort.

Will I be able to keep my new hire productive while I’m traveling?

A: Yes!

This one is kind of cheating since Simon (my part-time contractor who I’ll just start referring to by name), is super experienced and autonomous. He was able to be super productive with only very high-level input from me. The magic of working with good people!

With Simon’s help, will I be able to ship Pegasus releases with minimal effort?

A: Yes!

I managed to squeeze out a Pegasus release with multi-language support that I wrote almost zero of the code for.

Do I actually love my kids—who are 1 and 3—when forced to spend all my time with them?

A: Maybe most surprising of all… yes!

I thought for sure I’d be exhausted and fed up with hanging out with a couple toddlers for weeks on end, but it was actually kind of awesome and way less tiring and mind-numbing than I expected. I guess I like these little monsters.

Kids Selfie

Me and the boys bonding in Central Park.

Anyway, the trip was great. Mostly easier in the ways that I worried would be hard, and even better than I expected for the parts I thought would be good.

And it’s good to be back!

I felt a bit disoriented after being away from work for such a long time, so I tried to map out the rest of the year. Here’s what I got:

  1. Pegasus is still my priority. I’ll probably aim to spend somewhere between 50-75% of my time on it in some way. And I have a pretty good idea of the big pieces I want to get done in the next few months.
  2. I’m a bit lost outside of Pegasus. I made a list of things I might do in my non-Pegasus time: build a new product, write more, focus on Griffin, volunteer for other organizations, etc. but nothing is really calling me. I think I’m in one of those need to make a plan to figure out the plan phases. A.k.a. divergence.

Design Thinking

I’m in a divergence phase in terms of how to spend my time outside of Pegasus, though Pegasus itself is converging.

This Month’s Goals

  1. Ship a new Pegasus release. Simon’s got several new features that need to get smoothed out and integrated. Maybe I’ll even do some coding of my own this month!
  2. Choose a topic for my next Django guide. Once again I’ll try to time a big content launch with my annual Black Friday sale, so need to nail down the topic this month.

That’s it. See you next month.

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