Morning Writing + Timeboxing is very effective

Overall this week was a bit weird to me. I got a lot of content writing done. I do it first thing in the morning, and time-box it out to around 2 hours. I haven't posted them all yet (queuing it up) but I have gotten something done every day.

But, emotions and tiredness!

Overall I didn't FEEL very productive, and most of the reason was that I didn't have a solid plan I think. In other words, I didn't really have something to work on. I was hoping to get some freelance in, and I did get about 10 hours done but other than that not much.

I still have the recurring theme of exhaustion and sometimes just falling asleep and I don't know what is causing that. Maybe it's just my personal cycle. Hard to tell really, but if I can figure it out that would be great.

Networking feels to be paying off

I had some good networking this week. I did well in a front end dev interview for IBM Design, and set up a couple more interviews which I will have good reference to. More on how that goes next week...

Inspiration is strong with this one

I've been watching the Tim Ferris show and getting inspired by some of the ideas in that. I haven't really blogged or tracked it, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts. In fact, it's getting to the point where I am actually running OUT of podcast episodes because I've listened to EVERY SINGLE episode of multiple massive podcasts.

I think a lot of inspiration and ideas has come from listening to these various episodes, and so maybe I should promote podcast listening more to people. It could just be that I am constantly thinking about programming and ways to learn more.

When you have a sole focus, it's really easy to find opportunities to improve. Being scattered tends to lead nowhere. Something to think about for sure.

So what's the plan?

If some freelance work doesn't pop up for me to get done (which I really need in order to pay the bills) I'll be spending the next two days streaming myself doing a bit of a 'workathon' where I just try to go pure pomodoros all day long on one singular focus (improving my website in this case)

I'll be improving the portfolio, building an online resume, adding recent projects and reorganizing it to look more professional, and even redoing my About page as well. Soon I'll have my roommate take more photos of me to try and get a good consistent Avatar image that I can use going forward in branding myself.

I'll see how it goes (the workathon days) and if I enjoy it, maybe I'll use that idea to do a content creation workathon. I want to build a video website similar to railsclips, eventedmind, or egghead.io so perhaps that would be a cool project to build and create a video series of me building it?

On Monday I do have a phone interview, so that will interrupt my flow for a bit and depending on how it goes I could have other things to do so I'll play it by ear on that. Not the most ideal thing for this type of challenge, but this is more of a test run anyways to see how I do and maybe I'll try and pull off the week-long challenge like the time-lapse guy.

I did several week races, so if I put together enough work on something I really enjoy doing I am sure I can pull something off!

After the next two days of test running that idea, if I don't have something to work on I think I'll spend the large portion of the day learning. I want to start knocking off some of my learning Trello cards such as getting into pure Node, Angular, Gulp, React even perhaps.

Final thoughts?

Well, this recap was way longer than I thought it would be but I had some more fruitful thoughts after all! See you next week. Let's see how far I can get!

OH! One more thing, I have been doing a better job of tracking stuff on my main Kanban board. I cleaned it up a lot and reorganized what I'm actually tracking. I'm really happy about it and should have some good data by the end of the month, which is great because I'm doing a talk on Kanban productivity for a local meetup haha.

Okay peace out.