I quit contracting 6 months ago
coda.io
coda.io
One other piece of advice is to cut down on what you're trying to do. Like you said, you have way too many projects going at once. Focus on a single project and stop worrying about trying to save the world. Dedicate 8 hours a day to the project and as you accomplish goals, move forward. Spend 1-2 hours a day exercising. And if you want to spend it on youtube videos, then use your 8 hours a day on that, but realistically that doesn't appear to be very promising.
I took a year off about 10 years ago and I had a single project I worked on 8 hours a day. Once I spent 3 weeks just trying to increase the accuracy of my OCR from 93% to 98%. It's dumb, but that's freedom to pursue things just to learn. Take advantage of your freedom by focusing on the long tail, you can go very very deep into areas where you normally wouldn't have the opportunity.
Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those problems.
Now going back to look over the post to write this response I happened to mouse over the chart (something that I could do because I happened to be at my computer, but something I missed the first time on mobile) it actually showed me the values for each segment, and I was able to figure out what was going on. The units are days, but they are 24 hour days (since the entire post is about work schedules I would have assumed 8 hour days). That explains why the maximum tend to be ~2 (because 2 days is 48 hours). The chart would be a lot more intuitive if the duration was in hours, and no matter what the units should be labeled explicitly (in this case I would use "24 hour days").
Let's raise some specific complaints:
>So if you see "2 days 18 hours" that means "66 hours total time spent on this activity".
Completely superfluous. He goes on for 3 sentences explaining that a day contains 24 hours. WOW! AND he couldn't figure out how to keep his units, or make it unitless.
Chart 2:
>Here's how my work week tends to break down:
We break down the day into 4 time frames. Why? When does each timeframe begin and end? If the time is for a "work week" then why the hell does "monday" contain almost 200 hours? That's for 6 months, you say? Why?! It should be an average for a work week! No one intuitively knows how many hours occur on mondays over a 6 month period. Is that a lot of hours, or a few? You would have to do some mental math to even interpret this chart.
Chart 3:
>stacked bar graph
Enough said. It's impossible to comparatively interpret stacked bar graphs over time. You want to use a line graph when you want to compare things over time. Tell me, did he spend more time podcasting on 7/21, or the week after that? "Obvious!" you say, "he spent more time! It's clear!" Look again, however! The next week is 7/28, but the next label is 8/18. What? Where is 7/28? The labels are seemingly randomly distributed, with no rhyme or reason! Eventually you find 7/28 and lo-and-behold... they look about the same, but had to mouse over it to check, didn't you? Because they are separated vertically by nearly the entire chart.
And we didn't even get around to Happiness 3.0 Make a Change App Activity, which contains 41 distinct labels, and you can only read 3 of them at a time, and has all the same problems as the above... Or the Instagram chart that seems to contain the entire message as the label? Does an instagram post take 4 hours to make? What does this chart even mean?
Let's not sit here and suggest that it's "friendly advice" that a person isn't being helpful when they don't defend every statement they make. Anyone who tried to read this, actually read this, would immediately see that these charts are garbage and nearly meaningless. They probably make sense to the person who made them, but as a method of conveying information in a blog post to others, we can criticize without writing a dissertation about the mistakes here.
^ unfriendly advice
If you didn't mistate the dates, then it might even be changing its random distribution :-)
First one is obvious.
Second one becomes quickly clear when you realize that it has to be total of hours over some period of time. Otherwise it would not make sense.
Third one is quite interesting. It is very informative and interesting to observe.
These charts could be made better naturally.
Title and short description would definitely help.
For the second one I would also include totals - for each day, for each time period and most importantly grand total that has to be the same for days and periods. Also small explanation that this is hours distribution over period of this and that.
For the third one I would fix units of the duration. Current ones are difficult to interpret. Hours scale would make the most sense probably - 10, 20, ..., 40 (a normal work week, in the middle), ... 80.
I do not think that there is nothing bad in having multiple interests. Distributing ones time between multiple interests is a difficult task to tackle but it does not make it automatically meaningless. It is actually a good idea to have some time management and good data always helps.
I would have liked to make the charts a bit clearer but the customisation in Coda is quite limited. Nobody I showed it before posting it on HN had any complaints. I can add some more context to the bits that aren't clear.
As for how long I spend tracking my time... not too long really? I've been tinkering with my document here and there as I go, and now generally I just switch to the right project and hit "Start activity", pressing "Save" when I finish. I've been using Coda rather than bootstrapping (yet another) private time tracking web server because it provides a different sort of agility to what I'd get if I was programming everything myself.
As suggested by someone else, I'm going to subscribe to your videos, let's see if I get infected :)
My takeaways:
1. If your goal is to try and make money, being focused on one idea at a time is probably better than deep diving in to several narrow niches.
2. I shouldn't be discouraged by not (yet) generating income myself. Despite lots of stories of success and people telling you otherwise, it's a hard thing to do, especially if you work a full time job.
3. I'm really glad I don't bother with the effort of micro tracking my time like this. On the surface it seems appealing but after reading this it seems like it takes a lot of effort, and doesn't provide much value.
I wish the author compared his contracting value creation with his project's value creation.
More importantly - I just stopped doing those kinds of projects altogether. Why? Because you should do what you enjoy. Regardless of how much money you think it can make. Wasn't that the whole point of working for yourself in the first place?
If nothing comes of it, that's okay. At least you enjoyed yourself. The worst possible scenario is that you do something you're not enjoying and also don't make money - you have total control over one of those variables, as your own boss.
How do you find customers? (I.e. people with buying power, and clearly defined unsolved problems.) Being able to do so is a pretty valuable skill!
As for finding people to share your product with, it's very easy. If you had any hypothesis behind your solution, you can guess where your customers might be - and if you just approach these people (whether online or in person, such as what the Pinterest founder did), very few will refuse to give your product a try if you offer it gratis. Getting people to pay comes after getting people to love your product, and the latter is difficult enough that if you really did it you won't have to worry about the money.
Side Note: as someone who already has a ton of graphics videos on YouTube already, you shouldn't expect to get a lot of views there...
I suggest get your posts on your own domain not this coda thing whatever that is. Stick on CDN hosting like netlify for free. Use simple images or svg. Eschew Javascript for showing static content. It’s was too slo to read so I didn’t.
Example: https://superjavascript.com/t/typescript/ - that loads fast!
My connection speed and latency are good by the way.
I am suggesting that if you want to blog, and want people to read what you blog, to host it somewhere where it is readable on the widest range of devices. If a iPhone 6 with a 20Mbps mobile connection is too antiquated to render the site, then they are probably cutting out a lot of audience.
I don't know Coda, so I'll use the Confluence (which you suggest is similar) as an example. If I am using Confluence it is because I have to, for work. I will make a provision that maybe I can't read it on mobile and I need to be at my desktop. If I am reading a blog post from hacker news, I probably wont go to the effort of bookmarking it later to read on a desktop PC.