Month 2: Experiments in Life and Work

Hi friend,

October is ~~objectively the best month of the year~~ my favorite month of the year, and this one was no exception. The air cools down and gets crispy, the apples are ripe, and there is color everywhere. I think it's magical.

This was my second month without a real job, and I promised a monthly update so here we are! I've got a few different topics this month:

Establishing Rhythms
What I've been working on
Time limits

Establishing Rhythms

This month, the new rhythms we've had to establish as a family have started to take hold and it's feeling much better. The first month was a little chaotic for everyone as we had back to school and brand new schedules for everyone, but we've found some things that work and help to anchor our schedule. In no particular order they are:

I work 9am-1pm M-F, the "big kids" are in school 8:30am - 12:30pm M-F. We try to do a short (less than 1 min) send-off gathering where we all hold hands and say a short prayer together before we go our separate ways in the morning to make the transition a little more peaceful.
We all eat all 3 meals a day together. At dinner we take turns sharing highs and lows for the day to practice self-reflection and conversation skills.
We schedule certain chores for certain days. Grocery store trips happen Monday afternoon and Friday. One kid accompanies a parent on this trip, while the other two stay home and help with chores at home. This helps us:
1. spend less at the grocery store by not going random day
2. have some 1:1 time with the children
3. schedule time to get cleaning done, otherwise it doesn't happen (believe it or not the 4 and 5 year olds both told us yesterday that they really enjoy cleaning toilets)

We don't have everything figured out here. For instance, getting time for both parents to exercise in a given day is a little hit or miss. And we'd like to get to a point where Ruth (my wife) also has some dedicated time every week to write. The afternoons are tricky once the kids are home. But it's a really good start and everyone seems to understand the general flow of each day, which makes each day much more peaceful.

What I've been working on

You might be wondering how I've been spending my work time. At the end of September, I launched ColorBliss.art and to be honest, the response was better than I expected. Since launch, about 3.2k people have come to the site, and over the past two weeks 100+ people have created accounts. Most people are not paying any money, but I did generate about $240 in October! Honestly, I expected $0.

All time traffic for ColorBliss - 3.2k visitors so far!

Given that, most of my time has gone towards working on ColorBliss.art. I'm still not sure that it will be a full time income for me, but there is potential for some meaningful income from it and I am learning a ton.

What I realized I really like about this project is that it is an opportunity to exercise my product-building muscles but in a very low stress way. I'm not building business critical software. The downside of this is people don't pay very much for it. The upside of it is I don't have high stress support tickets. I like this for me a lot right now. I'm getting practice building out conversion flows, testing marketing strategies, testing pricing but with very low stakes. It's optimized for fun and creativity and rather than money. This balance suits me very well right now.

Time Limits

One thing I have been feeling more strongly this month are the self-imposed time limits. I've set myself the rather arbitrary limit of only working 20 hours a week. I'm doing pretty well in this regard - looks like I went a bit over last week: Screenshot 2023-11-07 at 9.48.36 AM.png

This time limit is inspired by my reading of The Pathless Path:

One of the goals of the pathless path is to make commitments: to a type of work, ways of living, creative projects, or a “conversation” with the world.

The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd

One of the things I am hoping to prove to myself (and to others) is that life doesn't have to be completely swallowed by money-generating activities.

The challenge of this is that I am starting to see opportunities or ideas that I would love to work on, but simply am not able to make the time for right now. I had a really fun idea for a Pumpkin Spice-themed website this fall (and even purchased pumpkinspice.wtf), but ended up shelving it because I thought there were higher priority things to work on for ColorBliss.

Likewise, browsing Twitter / X, I get almost daily inspiration for other products I could work on. Even the ones that don't seem like they would take too long to build and launch take away from progress I would make on other projects. I think I thought I would spend time on a lot more quantity of projects in this time, but I am finding that challenging. For now, I'm jotting down my project ideas in notes to save for a rainy day, and focusing on one or two things each week that I can make progress on.

All in all, I feel good about this challenge though. It feels much better to have a wealth of interesting ideas that I don't have time for, rather than a poverty of creative energy. Those ideas will be there if / when I have time, but I have plenty to do every day, and that is a good feeling to have.

October in review

The good stuff

ColorBliss has been received better than I expected
- $243 in revenue!
- it feels so amazing to have strangers on the internet give you money
Pizza night is coming back! Ruth and I have had a 11+ year tradition of a weekly pizza night. The kids had gotten to the point where they were not enjoying the pizza. I found a new recipe for pizza crust (sourdough whole wheat) and the kids LOVE it. I've been so glad to get this tradition back and in a way that everyone looks forward to. Other parts of this tradition include everyone prepping toppings and an epic dance party while the pizza(s) are in the oven.
Cool weather, flannel sheets, long sleeves. Did I mention October is my favorite month of the year?
The bread is getting better - I've continued baking sourdough and it's been getting better and better. There was a step change in quality at the end of the month, and we've been demolishing these garlic & rosemary loaves
Dorothy turned 4 on Halloween and we celebrated with an Avengers costume party. Here's our Avengers HQ (I'm Vision). So much fun!

Hard stuff

my only customer for SuperSupport.ai churned :(
- I'll probably push this project into maintenance mode
not being able to work on other fun ideas i have (pumpkinspice.wtf)
The garden didn't really work out this season. We are focusing on building up our compost over the winter for a better spring soil.