The New Normal

November, 2018 Retrospective

Phew.

We are now five and a half weeks into parenthood and slowly settling into the new normal.

I gotta say, it’s quite the change!

Both Ro and I are still trying to figure out the shape of our new lives, work schedules, and all that. I’m slowly ramping up my work—currently working one day a week for Dimagi and targeting one day a week for my own stuff.

It feels surprisingly full already—despite the fact that most “normal” dads have to go back to work full-time by now. As always, I’m incredibly grateful for the flexibility my new career and lifestyle affords me. It’s hard to imagine leaving Ro to deal with the baby full time this early on into parenthood.

Anyways.

Enough about me, let’s get into it!

Place Card Me

Place Card Me had a nice November!

As I predicted at the beginning of the month—it cracked $2000 in a month for the first time ever! Given that I did almost no work on the site, I have to attribute this entirely to the annual holiday bump that I saw last year.

Still—it’s an exciting milestone and even checks off one of my 2018 goals that I was worried about ($2k/month passive income). Woot!

Time

Entering into the month I had zero expectations about how much time I’d get to spend on anything besides childcare, and overall I’m pleasantly surprised with the results!

Nov 2018 Time

Time breakdown for November, 2018

The most exciting thing for me was that I was still able to exercise just as much as I was pre-child. This was a huge concern for me going into this whole parenthood thing, and it’s been a huge relief that I’m still able to make it work (so far).

I spent most of my time last month working on my own projects, and decided to do a bit of a reset from what I’d been doing previously (working almost exclusively on Place Card Me). Which brings us to…

Output

It was a fun and exciting month output-wise! I started some new projects, revived some old ones, and generally gave myself the entire month to just work on whatever “felt right” with very little strategy or goals in mind.

The results were:

  1. I started a new, potentially big project! A Django SaaS Template. Okay, at the moment it’s barely more than a landing page, but still it’s exciting. I think there’s a real need for something like this in the world and I think maybe I’ll be able to build something to fill that need. I’ll be writing a lot more about this in the future.
  2. I started a Cape Town hike guide. This is something that is a pure passion-project. I just want this resource to exist, and I have all the information to make it happen, so I threw up the MVP which I’ll hopefully improve on over time. I also got to play with Airtable for the first time which was quite fun.
  3. I worked on my Google Photos Chrome Extension! My poor, long-neglected Chrome Extension. I added a “history” functionality that—in my opinion—is pretty slick, and also signed up to give a talk on it this week for a bit of local promotion.
  4. I wrote about being a new parent—again, mostly just for me.

Looking Ahead

A few goals and plans for the coming month:

  1. I want to finish my re-entry back to Dimagi, and further establish a sustainable work/life rhythm.
  2. I want to do my end-of-year review and plans-for-2019 exercise and write ups.
  3. I hope to keep working on the Django SaaS Template project.

I have more to say, but I’ll reserve that for the end-of-year post.

Life

Obviously Lockwood has taken over my life, but I’m still doing my best to get out into the world.

See you at the end of the year!

—Cory