Day 253: August Review

status

We’re almost closer to the end of September than to the end of August so I better get cracking on this review!

Format:

  • What went well?
  • What didn’t go well?
  • Metrics
  • Overall reflections

What went well?

👴🏽 My grandpa is healthy

This month was… a lot. My house in Santa Cruz got evacuated due to wildfires, and the day after I arrived at my parents’ place in Orange County, I took my grandpa to the emergency room for swollen feet and shortness of breath. I ended up spending a bunch of time with him in the hospital while he waited for a pacemaker implant. Thankfully everything went well, and my grandpa is back to watching YouTube and asking me for tech support so all’s normal in the Kang home.

Even though this month felt rough overall, I’m grateful for my family’s health.

🚢 Onboarded friends to Browserflow

I’ve onboarded 18 people to Browserflow so far after starting to do so at the end of July, and it’s been great getting feedback from real-world use cases. Some major realizations from onboarding people and getting feedback:

  • People think it’s cool, but it’s not obvious what you’d use it for

    • I need to come up with a gallery to showcase different use cases

  • The UI is confusing

    • Some people have a hard time completing simple actions like deleting a command so I need to rework the UI a bit

  • CLOUD

    • I’ve had several people independently request being able to run their flows in the cloud and schedule it. From looking at a bunch of products in this space, this is actually pretty standard and this is the Big Challenge to tackle after getting the local case working well

What didn’t go well?

😵 Unable to focus

I’m having an extremely difficult time getting things done these days. A few months ago, I was shipping major features every single day and getting tons done — now, whole weeks go by without much progress.

I’ve also gotten hooked on Starcraft which has been no bueno for my addictive personality.

🛌 Poor self-care

My routines and priorities fell apart when I came to my parents’ place. I’m heavily influenced by my environment, and being in my hot, ant-infested room all day without the ability to go somewhere else to work has been pretty terrible. It also makes it too easy to just go wild playing Starcraft or waste time without any sort of accountability that comes from working around other people.

I’ve gone on and on how important I find the core pillars of sleep, exercise, nutrition, and meditation for maintaining a baseline state of well-being, and I’d like to prioritize it because without them, everything else feels way harder.

Metrics

Users & Revenue

I’ve been putting off looking at Intention feedback because I know I’m focusing on Browserflow these days, but that also makes me feel a bit guilty because they’re taking the time to write. I’d really like to dedicate a month to fixing bugs and adding a few more features that I have in mind to Intention but I’ve been saying this for a while now…. Will I be able to pull myself from Browserflow anytime soon?

Time

For comparison, I spent 251 hours on Browserflow in June so this is a massive reduction from then (but then again, that was insane).

I’ve also been spending less time writing Road to Ramen posts (mostly because I put it off until I’m ready to pass out and then barf up some garbage in a few minutes), which I’d like to remedy.

Overall reflections

Tough month, but such is life. I’m hoping that fixing my self-care routine will translate to work and everything else flowing more smoothly, too. We’ll see.