This week I made great progress on The Freelancer’s Guide to Niche Marketing. My original plan was to have it out in Q1, which has clearly been missed. I was caught up in other projects and not feeling the book so I didn’t worry about it. I’m happy to say that I’ve got back into it and am really enjoying the writing process.

Other than that, a tan is coming as I spend a bunch of time in the mountains running. We’re looking forward to about 2 weeks from now when skating takes a 6 week break and we get a bit less time pressure on the family.

If you’ve found my content helpful then new in 2019 I’ve opened up a Patreon page. You can help ensure that more helpful content keeps coming.

I Shipped

Monday I put together a video where you could watch me solve a coding problem while using my iPad as my development tool. While I’ve had some great feedback on that video, I’ve also been told that I’m a bad developer and the iPad is terrible.

It’s funny how those negative comments stick with you so much more than the 10 positive comments. I think that much of development is muddling through challenges and that thinking properly about how you can figure out the solution is what developers do.

That’s it, busy week but I do have a long post about to send over to Liquid Web about the small 1% errors that can kill a business. I think it’s going to be really good so watch and I’ll link to it.

Friday Five

1. When you’re home are you present?

Even when the entrepreneur is home, she’s often not there. Struggling to keep pace with the overwhelming demands of her business she succumbs to the lure of multitasking. Her “together time” with her son consists of sitting in his room while he plays video games and she reviews payroll. – For Better or for Work

Does this describe your time with your kids or your spouse? Is it always one more message, email, note for the business? If so, you’re showing them every day that they’re not as important as the other things you’re focusing on. You’re voting today, for what you want the relationship to be in the future, and it’s a relationship absent of any connection.

2. Hard decisions now make the future easier

From Farnam Street:

And in the same way compounding interest increases our bank balance, better decisions produce exponentially better results the more of them we make. Hard decisions today, made well, prepare us to make decisions more easily in the future.

What hard decisions are you making today? Today I said no to much of the work I’d do for me because in this season I need to focus on billable hours and build up the emergency fund that my wife and I want.

Overall, I’m doing less things I’m in love with, and more things that I enjoy but don’t love.

The thing is that a big buffer of cash helps purchase my time later so I can finish that marketing book I started talking about in January

3. Slack is an all day meeting

From the Nuclino blog:

At least meetings consume a bounded amount of time. Chat, on the other hand, maintains a constant presence throughout your workday. The brightly colored pop-up notifications accompanied by a pleasant little sound effect elicits an almost Pavlovian response, leaving us in a constant state of partial focus and robbing us of uninterrupted stretches of time to concentrate on the work we’re supposed to be doing.

Why I use iOS as my main working operating system and have no notifications on it. I don’t want to be in all day meetings, I want to ship code and words for customers and myself. I want to produce something, so I set myself up to do just that.

Does your work environment set you up to produce something every day? If not, what are yo going to do about that?

The article goes on to give us some of the things that are helping the team at Nuclino produce good work without being distracted all the time.

4. Short look at Digital Minimalism from No Sidebar

Dave Hall on No Sidebar:

“Have you seen the tiger yet?” I had just refilled my cup at Grace Street Coffee on the campus of Georgetown University and was somewhere into my second hour of media mindlessness on my iPhone when a nice looking young man in jeans and a long sleeve button-down planted himself in front of me and jolted me out of my stupor with his bizarre question

That’s the feeling that Hall had when reading Digital Minimalism, having Cal Newport asking him if he’d seen the tiger of social media for what it was. Dangerous.

A few weeks back I did a video/audio/written extravaganza look at the same book.

5. Brain Farts and Errors

I enjoyed this reminder from AYJAY that we all make mistakes. I bet I have at least one spelling mistake a week despite running spell check and Grammarly on most writing that goes through this site.

The worst is his “brain farts” and how so many people will discount your point because of a minor detail that is incorrect. I don’t have time for people like that so don’t send me emails about it.

You shouldn’t waste time on those people either.