Week three recap

Week three seems to have been pretty frantic one way or another. First things first, I have a confession to make. When I started this challenge to quit corporate life and tirn a bunch of side hustles into my majority income stream, I overlooked one fairly fundamental thing. I still have a job (at least for now). As a result, I'm finding time is a valuable commodity and trying to juggle work on this blog and the copious amount of ideas and projects that are springing from it, while still working as a fairly senior exec in a tech company, is proving to be one of the biggest challenges. Needless to say, we have to find a way through it - until we reach some of our cashflow and savings targets we aren't in a position to look a gift horse company paycheck in the mouth. This week has brought this into sharp perspective as I've had to take an overseas trip for the day job and struggled to find the time to follow through on a few of our targets for the week.

Our weekly targets are set out in the previous weeks recap (good practice - gives you a playbook to work from and a measure of success) - see week two recap for the details, but basically

• 3 blog posts on here (and maintain any good updates cadence on other projects);
• Finalise and launch www.nerdreading.com;
• Make some more progress on the book - finish a chapter;
• Plan for an app;
• No new projects;
• Keep up with correspondence from adoring fans.

Results were decidedly mixed this week, probably due to a combination of the aforementioned business trip; over ambitious goals in a couple of areas; and our inate ability to find new stuff to start projects about rather than focussing on what's already in flight. Clearly we're starters and not finishers - that's going to need some work.

Maintain blog and project update cadance ✓

Strictly speaking we've kept this ticking over - 4 posts on here and a handful a few on www.therenovationdiaries.com. Where we've struggled is www.nerdreading.com. We have plenty of material (actually that's part of the problem), but haven't found a way to optimise the overhead of posting. See the next section for a bit more info

Finalise and launch www.nerdreading.com ✗

Hmmm. Tricky one this one. We've finalised all the technical details and continue to consume posts, blogs and books voraciously, so have no shortage of material. What we found though is that the process of putting up a new piece is too cumbersome. Our simple publishing system works well for slightly longer form literature, but for something that we want to be adding content too 5 or 6 times a day, the overhead is too much. We've decided this needs a rethink to streamline it a little. Two options are in play at the moment

More automation around the process of posting new content. We could easily automate some of the work to get a new piece up (screenshots for web-based content; timestamps and calculations for when it was read and how long it took, for example), which would shave a good chunk from the time it takes to register an interesting piece.

This may be an AND rather than an OR, but we find ourselves consuming so much content on mobile devices that something that sits closer to the consumption would streamline things a lot. This could be some automation with the tools we use to consume (flipboard, kindle, etc); a simple mobile app to allow us to transcrive things on the fly as soon as we've read something interesting; or something more radical, like an Alexa skill to trigger the creation of a new entry.

Neeless to say, this still needs more work, so is going on the backburner for now while we give it a little more thought in order to find a way to make the overhead of getting content live less cumbersome.

Progress on the book ✓

First draft of chapter one is now complete and we're a good chunk through chapter two. Weirdly (although this will probably become clear when you read the book), weve also done the first paragraph for all the other chapters. It's all a little rough around the edges, but is starting to shape up nicely. We're actually pretty excited about how the story is starting to form into something much more coherent than what's bounced around in my head for all these years. I'm also finding I really enjoy the process of writing - hours on end slip by me tapping away at the keyboard, and I have developed a weird phenomenon were I don't really know what I've written until I stop and read it back (?!). Come to think of it, it's probably not a phenomenone so much as the epitomy of verbal diarrhoea... Meh, works for me.

Research around an app or plugin ✓

A little concrete progress in this space this week. There'll be a post along in the next couple of weeks with the full details, so I won't give too much away at this stage, but we have the rought idea formed up now to develop a dashboard for self-publishing authors. This will come as a browser plugin (new tab page) and help authors track and manage some of the basic info that's required (website, social media feeds, sales and promotional stuff, etc). We figured what better way to battle test and develop the idea than to eat our own dog-food, so we'll be running this as a parallel project to our own journey into self-publishing. More to follow.

No new projects ✗

Failed miserably on this one. Crappy home wifi got me into looking at mesh networks, which led to smart home automation and connected devices, and inevitably I registered a domain and put together the skeleton of a new site. This one will be a combination of 'traditional' website (woah, that's a weird thing to say) and youtube channel; focussed on all things smart home, including news and reviews, but specifically around the practical aspects of putting it all together. Ties in nicely with the fact that we're renovating the house and means I get to play with lots of cool new stuff. It's far from ready for prime-time yet, but I'll potter along with it when I have some minutes spare.

Anything else?

God no! Week three has been exhausting. opefully we learn our lesson and double-down on getting a few things off our plate before piling up the next round of delicious hare-brained schemes.

So what next?

Next week, we're hoping to achieve a few things:

• Continue the good cadence on posting - 3 posts minimum on here (and reasonable progress on www.therenovationdiaries.com too);
• Come up with a viable plan to streamline the logistics of nerdreading.com;
• More progress on the book - ideally chapter 2 is complete and we've started on chapter 3;
• Blog post (and therefore some more flesh on the bones) around our first app;
• A little progress on the smart home site/youtube concept - maybe the site finalised and starting to think about content for the first few articles/videos. Also need to do way more research on the video side as it's something I have no experience with;
• And of course, as always, we'll be responding to the thousands of comments, questions, requests for turning on of christmas lights, kissing of baby's heads, etc. (Told you I'll keep dropping this in until it comes true)

Will we make any progress? Will we realise that scientific sounding words doesn't necessarily make products more 'believable' (I'm looking at you L'oreal)?; will people stop abbreviating perfectly good words and phrases under the guise of it being eaiser to type? Just learn to type for heaven's sake! Join us next time for the answers to this and the meaning of life, while also eavesdropping on our journey to Financial Freedom in 199 Easy Steps.