Welcome to the second weekly retrospective on the sabbatical!
Like I mentioned last time, I write these mostly for myself, but please follow along if it interests you!
Goals
Here’s my Week 2 report card.
| # |
Goal |
Grade |
| 1 |
Ship blog 1 + newsletter 1 |
A |
| 2 |
Write blog 2+ |
A |
| 3 |
Decide what idea to pursue first + next week rough plan |
C |
| 4 |
Log < 5 hours to day to day life |
B |
| 5 |
Get into better sleep schedule |
A- |
| 6 |
Minimal reading of blogs |
B+ |
| 7 |
Minimal planning outside of weekly retro |
A |
- First blog shipped! My first newsletter is going out later today. I’m counting it.
- I drafted two more blogs and the ideas post is out today! Boom.
- I sucked at this. I definitely fell victim to a bit of analysis paralysis on picking an idea and running with it. I rationalized this by saying I wanted to get feedback on the ideas post first, but really a few votes and comments from mostly friends and family should probably not be the metric I’m using to pick an idea, and deep down I know this…
- I ended up logging 8 hours in my “day to day life” bucket - though a lot of that was on the weekend when I usually do personal admin stuff - so it’s not so bad.
- I wasn’t sleeping great for a lot of my first week. I think I had too much on the brain and some anxiety about everything. It went a lot better last week!
- I spent a lot of time reading blogs and advice my first week, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t fall into a trap of reading and not doing. Overall, I think I did okay on this, though am still reading a fair amount of solopreneur-style blogs which I hope to continue to cut back on.
- My first week I also spent a lot of time looking at goals and todo lists and reprioritizing and rearranging them. I decided that is probably not a good of time and I should just dive in and do things (even if they might be the wrong things). I did much better on that this week.
Overall thoughts
I’m disappointed I didn’t make headway on picking something to pursue next as that was arguably the most important goal I had -
though I am happy that I got that first blog out.
That was a bit of a “no turning back” moment for me, and it felt good - if terrifying - to ship it to the world.
Time
Here’s the time breakdown for week 2.
Week 2 time breakdown
I’m quite happy with the high-level time breakdown on the left side.
I logged almost 37 hours to the sabbatical which is a good range - not too low to be meaningless but not too high to be stressful.
The rest of the time went to day to day life and mid-week activities like hiking and surfing.
Within the sabbatical I’m less thrilled about how things went.
Thirteen hours on writing seems like a lot and something I will definitely aim to cut back on.
Likewise 5 weeks on “marketing”? I don’t even have anything to market yet!
Half that time is probably just me refreshing my Facebook feed. Sigh.
The biggest disappointment is the paltry 3 hours spent on exploring products.
I’d like to get that number up significantly this week.
Life
Two runs, two surfs, a hike and a trip to the winelands with my wife and her sister - another good week for life.
Here’s a weekly instagram. The sharks were out in force this week!
till next time,
Cory