Day 125: April Review

Started this on May 1, put it off, and now it’s suddenly May 9th. Would like to get better at completing these in a timely manner, heh.

In typical fashion, here’s the format for the review:

• What went well?
• What didn’t go well?
• What would I like to do differently?
• Metrics
• Overall reflections

What went well?

🚀 Intention got thousands of new users

I first launched Intention on Product Hunt, which didn’t get much traffic even though it got to #6. Around 170 people installed Intention. And then I launched on Hacker News, which went bananas. Over 2,500 people installed Intention!

It’s been really lovely seeing people benefit from my work and appreciating it:

I can feel a lot more momentum behind the product, and it’s exciting that thousands of people are regularly using it.

💪🏽 Better self-care

I view my baseline well-being in terms of three foundational pillars: sleep, nutrition, and exercise.

Sleep

• In March, there were only 3 days where I went to bed before 12am
  (Fun fact: I’ve been tracking my sleep schedule in a spreadsheet for the past 3 years)
• In April, there where 10 days where I went to bed before 12am

Not quite where I’d like to be, but it’s progress! The sleep schedule I thrive on most is 10pm to 6am / 9pm to 5am, so I’d eventually like to get to sleeping before 12am every night. Yup, I’m basically an old grandpa chilling in a young man’s body.

Nutrition

In terms of quality, I’m eating pretty healthily, but I’ve definitely been overeating due to rampant snacking. This hasn’t changed much in April, and I’m hoping to develop a habit of limiting eating to meals and not munching on stuff all day long.

Exercise

I picked up the calisthenics routine that I first started using five years ago, and it’s been great. I’ve been working out Mon, Wed, Frii and doing yoga on Tue, Thu, Sat. I’ve missed some days, but overall, I’ve been quite consistent with it, and there’s been noticeable progress (I can do a one-arm pushup again!). Here’s what a typical workout looks like for me (of course I track them in a spreadsheet, what did you expect?):

I enjoy this routine because it provides a full-body workout with minimal equipment (you only need a pull-up bar and two chairs for dips) and uses progressive overloading, meaning that the exercises are designed to get harder over time to adjust to your increased strength.

I might do a full post explaining this routine (the website linked above is fairly confusing which is a shame because the routine is awesome) along with a template of the spreadsheet I made — let me know if you’re interested!

Meditation

I’ve also started meditating more regularly and for longer periods. I do this first thing in the morning after I wash up, and it’s been great starting the day with stillness. I find myself getting lost in thought fairly frequently during my sits, but like I wrote about almost a year ago now, this doesn’t really feel like a problem to be fixed like it once did. Thought come, thoughts go.

What didn’t go well?

🚫 I scrapped Intention’s social feature

I spent several weeks working on a social feature for Intention that lets people create groups, build group streaks, and see other members’ daily usage. I released it to a small group of friends, but decided not to move forward with it because it didn’t feel quite right. It would’ve been nice to hit on something that felt great on my first try, but hey, that’s product development for ya!

I have an idea for a social feature that feels much more aligned with Intention’s goals compared with the group streaks feature so I’m excited to explore that sometime soon.

🙈 I’m not sure what to do with Hide Feed

With Intention taking off, I’m not sure how I’d like to move forward with Hide Feed. It works quite well and is basically complete so there’s nothing I need to do, but there’s the open question of whether to merge Hide Feed into Intention. Many people have suggested going in that direction, but I’m not sure. I’m not convinced that having everything under a single extension is necessarily better than having separate extensions, and it’s unclear if the increase in product complexity would be worth the benefit.

They serve different use cases, even though it doesn’t appear that way to most people. Intention answers the question “do I want to use this site / how long do I want to use it?” while Hide Feed answers the question “how do I want to use this site?” There might not seem to be a meaningful distinction here, so I’ll give an example. I don’t use Intention with Gmail but I do use Hide Feed with it — I don’t want to limit my email usage, but I appreciate not getting distracted by new emails every time I go to my inbox to reference a particular email or write a new one. Trying to replicate that setup if Intention and Hide Feed were one extension would mean managing distracting sites separately from sites with content blocking. Definitely possible, but not sure if it’s worth it.

Even if I don’t combine them product-wise, there’s the question of whether to combine them payment-wise. That is, would it make sense to combine them together in a “digital mindfulness” bundle? Given that the audience for the two extensions are basically the same, this might make sense, but I’m going to hold off because putting my efforts into improving Intention seems like a better investment right now.

What would I like to do differently?

🗓 Better planning

Given the massive influx of feedback, I’ve found myself working in a reactive state rather than in an intentional state. I’m spending a lot of time treating tasks that aren’t urgent as if they were and not spending enough time on other important tasks.

I’m going to introduce more planning and regular reflection to avoid falling into the trap of doing work that feels productive but isn’t that impactful.

• Once a week: I’m going to do a weekly review where I reflect on the past week and come up with the most important goals for the upcoming week
• Once a day: In the morning, I’m going to choose the most important tasks to work on that day (pulled from the weekly plan) before I process inbound requests and communication
• Throughout the day: I’m going to work in 25 minute / 50 minute blocks where I set a task and don’t stray from it

I’ve already started incorporating this, and it’s made a pretty big difference. I’m currently writing this post as part of a 50 minute focus block, and I’ve already avoided several distractions that would’ve taken me away from my current task:

• Messaging my friend about an artist we like
• Looking up how much noise cancellation affects battery life in Airpod Pros
• Going upstairs to grab a snack (so much for less snacking amirite)

Setting an intention for a block of time and knowing that a break is coming up makes it much easier to defer distractions for later. The Pomodoro technique works! We’ll see how helpful all this remains over time because there’s often a novelty effect that makes new practices way more effective in the beginning compared to when you’ve gotten used to them.

Metrics

Users & Revenue

I have yet to decide when and how to introduce a paid plan for Intention, but if 1% of the current users convert to paid users at $5 a month, I’d have 60 users * $5 = $300 MRR. While that’d be nice, I’m not in a rush to monetize so I’m going to focus on improving Intention as a product.

Time

I tend to forget to track time when I’m working on non-programming tasks (marketing, design, customer support, Show & Tell, etc.), but overall, this seems like a fair representation of how I’ve been spending my time.

I worked (at least) 135 hours this month, which results in the following per-day averages (I also work on weekends so the 30-day one is more accurate):

• 135 hours / 30 days = 4.5 hours a day
• 135 hours / 22 weekdays = 6.14 hours a weekday

Given that these are on-task productive hours, I’m working a bunch! Thankfully, it’s still loads of fun.

Since I haven’t posted my time log in my monthly reviews before, I thought I’d compile the historical numbers from Toggl since they span all the way back to January:

I’m surprised by how remarkably consistent I’ve been in the number of hours worked. The numbers of hours in April is basically identical to March. Neat.

Overall reflections

Having a successful launch brought a lot of wind beneath my sails, and it feels like there’s quite a bit of traction here. I’m excited!