Day 392: January Review

I’m actually doing a monthly review at the start of the new month instead of a few weeks in. Unbelievable, I know.

What went well?

🎉 Doing lots of fun things

I continued socializing a ton this month. Looking back on my calendar, I had some sort of social event on most days, which is crazy. It’s been fun, but I’m overdoing it because as I’ll talk about later in this review, it came at the cost of getting absolutely nothing done work-wise.

💪🏽 Consistent exercise

I’ve been swimming and working out at the gym pretty consistently, and it feels great to see progress in my swimming technique and strength training.

💫 Powerful and beautiful trip

I ended the month with my first solo trip in three years. There were some difficult periods that had its roots in the extremely difficult group trip I had last year, but that difficulty allowed for some beautiful openings and insights into myself. I’m not sure what the long-term effects of this particular trip will be, but it introduced much more tenderness in my relationship with myself.

What didn’t go well?

💔 Poor relationship

Things didn’t work out with the girl that I was seeing, but I don’t really see this as a bad thing as it was a good learning experience. I found that I can actually become anxious while dating even though that is not typical for me, and it was a good reminder to trust my gut more because there were some early signs that I had ignored. I ended up spending quite a bit of mental and emotional energy on this relationship especially when things were quickly deteriorating at the end, which helped contribute to…

😱 Did not do any work

In December, I thought I hadn’t done any work but was pleasantly surprised to find that I had put in about 110 hours. In January, I thought I was doing an okay amount of work but was surprised to find that I had put in only 37 hours. If I remove the time spent journaling, that’s only 19 hours of productive time spent on my projects for the whole month. That’s how much time I spent in a single day back in my coding frenzy in June of last year.

This is why I find tracking my hours and journaling to be incredibly helpful — it provides a regular reality check so I can find out if I’m way off base in terms of how I’m spending my time.

Metrics

Users & Revenue

Time

Overall reflections

December and January were nice vacations, but it’s time to get serious about work again. My intention for this year is to transition my focus from building a product to building a business, and I’m excited to actually put my weight behind that and make it happen.