A journal experiment for the month of April in 2018
I am live-blogging my entire process and thought patterns around work this month. Follow along!
Posts:
- Wed at 07:34 - An update: one thing
- Sat at 01:14 - Closing projects from C to G
- Fri at 14:51 - Hoodies and website edits
- Fri at 12:46 - Learning to say no
- Wed at 08:41 - Issues with streaks
- Thu at 22:13 - Silent Book Club
- Wed at 16:49 - Maintainer Repository Audits and Open Collective
- Wed at 12:16 - Open Source Meetups in Montreal
- Wed at 11:31 - Why am I writing on this site?
- Wed at 11:27 - Planning better social media integration for posts
- Tue at 20:54 - The CBC and daily roundup
- Mon at 20:08 - Web development day
- Mon at 11:38 - The Litt Review
- Mon at 11:32 - April priorities
All content CC-BY-NC © 2018 Richard Littauer.
April. A new month. My goal last month had been to write my thesis; I wasn’t able to complete this in time. I still have time, but it does push back my plans a bit. This month, I am hoping to do better.
Focusing on multiple priorities hasn’t proved to be a useful exercise. At some level, I’ll never be able to focus entirely - I still have to eat, sleep, exercise. However, mentally, I ought to be able to focus on one thing at a time, by time boxing certain activities and with adequate planning.
The first priority are my clients, mostly freelance, and my paying customers through Maintainer. The second priority are my Patreons, who expect something from their donation. The third priority is my thesis, which I’m going to focus on weekend evenings until all of my client jobs are done, at which point it’ll go back to being first priority for a while. Last month, I tried to focus on the thesis first - and I didn’t get very far in terms of client work, or making money. Let’s fix that this month.
My money situation isn’t great. I’ve spent roughly $3000 a month to live over the past few months. I want to make sure that I’m able to make that much money, after taxes, this month. I also want to pay off my two remaining Federal loans; as of right now, that’s $8,808.33. These have a lower interest than my other larger loans, but I pay proportionally more for these as the minimum is higher, and I want to use the snowball method to pay off my loans, because I think that has better psychological feedback than hitting the larger loans first. That means I need to make roughly $18,000 before taxes this month, or set up contracts where it’s possible to do that in the future. This is an outlandish goal, but I don’t think it’s impossible if I focus on providing value (as opposed to just getting money, which can more easily lead to shoddy work). It’s a moonshot; I just happen to be predisposed to moonshot goals.
Finally, I’ve got some travel planned this April. I’m driving to Pittsburgh on the 16th, and may not return to Montréal immediately afterwards. So, I need to also plan for both that trip and for any other trips happening in May and June, and to move my stuff out of Montréal by then.
My goals for this month, in bullet points:
Let’s get started.