Takeaways after the first month
08 February 2019
tl;dr
- Based on RescueTime reports my productivity was ok, but I don’t feel that way
- When I have to deal with repetitive tasks, I got distracted easily
- It’s also hard to stay motivated during these tasks
- Tested the pomodoro technique to stay focused » didn’t work, looking for a new solution
- Need to organize my tasks much better » looking for a new TODO app, installed Notion, haven’t really tested it yet
- First product launched 🚀 (but it was a silent launch)
The first month just gone, and two days ago we passed the 10% mark in the yearly progress bar
▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 10%
— Year Progress (@year_progress) February 6, 2019
I started using RescueTime about 5 years ago to get some information about the things I spend the most time with. The yearly review just came out and I can’t say I’m satisfied. I spent quite a lot time with distracting activities. To be exact, 653 hours! That’s almost a month. I have to do better this year. Based on the stats from the first month I'm on the right track but I’m still spending too much time on Twitter. Which is crazy, because I just read it 😂 Here are my numbers for January:
The goal for this month is to spend at least the same amount of time with productive things as I did in January and decrease the time of distracting activities. For example, instead of Twitter, I could read a book. That would also help to reach my yearly goals.
I noticed, that I have a hard time when I had to deal with repetitive tasks. Which is strange because previously I used these to “relax” and turn my brain off a bit. Now, after 15-20 minutes I totally lost my focus and always found something to work on instead. Of yourcse, I can’t skip these tasks so I started to use the Pomodoro 🍅 technique again, which helped me previously when I had focus issues. Well, it wasn’t as good as I hoped. When finally I was “in the flow” I couldn’t stop just because the session ended. I wanted to finish the task I started but the pomodoro app distracted me. So after a while I turned it off and kept working without it. This doesn’t mean that this is a wrong technique because I really liked it previously, it boosted my productivity but somehow failed this time. So, I’m still looking for the ideal solution to deal with “boring” stuff.
I always used some kind of app to manage my todos but in the past years my inbox became my primary todo list. I know this is not good, but worked for me 😄 I also had a paper based todo list next to it, but those were the Less urgent - Important tasks Now my inbox looks totally different and I have to spend much more time to organize my tasks. So I started to use my notebook more often to manage my daily tasks but I don’t think this will be the best tool to deal with my long term goals. As far as I can see, now everyone is really into Notion so first I’ll take a look at that. I already installed it and watched a few tutorials how to set it up properly but it still looks a bit confusing for me. We’ll se 😄
Aaaand I (silent) launched my first product, called HashtagCalendar. The main purpose of HashtagCalendar is to provide some inspiration for small businesses or individuals when they want to create some content on Instagram but have no idea what that should be about. HashtagCalendar provides daily and holiday hashtag suggestions with a short description and other suggested hashtags.
Why silent launch? I haven’t really tested it yet and I have to add some extra holiday hashtags to the upcoming month as well. After that, it’ll be ready for the Product Hunt launch 🚀 Hopefully, at the beginning of next week.
What’s next?
- Collect 100 notification subscribers for HashtagCalendar
- Start to work on the second project
For the RescueTime screenshot I used screely