Day 196: Week 29 Plan

status

Week 28

The past few days have felt challenging.

There was the surprise of having a small Chrome change significantly detract from Browserflow’s usability, but there’s something beyond that, too.

There’s a sort of restlessness that seems to be brewing underneath, which is fairly uncommon for me. Generally, I’m pretty content with wherever I am with whatever I’m doing.

That restlessness comes coupled with a decrease in motivation and excitement, which has manifested in me not doing much but lounging about, scrolling through Twitter/Hacker News/Reddit/whatever much more than usual, and generally feeling a bit off.

This could certainly just be the lingering effects of me completely messing up my sleep schedule at the beginning of the week by procrastinating on a talk that I gave to a group of interns, but it might also be symptomatic of a million other things.

The last time I felt somewhat like this was about 8 weeks ago on week 21, which is when I thought I might be burning out and decided to play around more, which led to me working on Browserflow. Wow, has it already been two months already?

I’d guess part of this is due to feeling sort of in limbo with Browserflow. I feel like I haven’t made significant progress on it in a while, so it’s a good thing that I was able to meet my one goal for this week and submit Browserflow to the Chrome Web Store:

I’m hoping it goes through without significant issues because then I’ll be able to start onboarding beta (more like alpha) testers. Having other people use it and give feedback will likely inject more energy.

At the same time, I recognize that these sorts of lulls are part of the natural flow of things, and I want to accept things as they are rather than trying to reject it because it’s not fun/high-energy/invigorating. It is what it is!

Snippets

  • Done (Planned)

    • Submit Browserflow for approval in the Chrome Web Store

  • Done (Unplanned)

    • Prepare and give talk about side projects for my friend’s speaker series

Week 29

Thinking about what I want to work on this week, I feel pulled in different directions. Some things that come to mind:

  • Browserflow

    • Build a landing page for Browserflow to collect alpha/beta signups
    • Record more demos of Browserflow to share its capabilities
    • Look into running Browserflow in the cloud (okay, getting ahead of myself here)

  • Intention

    • Finish the Pomodoro feature I started right before switching over to Browserflow
    • Migrate Intention over to Redux (wait, I definitely want to do this at some point, but starting another big refactor right now is a terrible idea given my low energy level)
    • Add accounts and a paid plan

I feel drawn to working on Intention since I haven’t touched it in a while and there are a few bugs that I want to fix because they’ve been annoying me, but maybe I should take a break from dev work this upcoming week and just play around with making cool demos with Browserflow?

Or maybe just take a break from working and spend a week playing guitar? Learn how to draw? Read some books?

Clearly, I’m not feeling incredibly motivated right now (but that’s okay, too).

Alright, I’ll set an easy goal for this week (that’s kind of what I said the last two weekly planning sessions but somehow they haven’t felt that easy) and then see how I feel as the week progresses.

Snippets

  • Browserflow

    • Create a super basic landing page with just the logo and a link to sign up for the beta