Day 765: January 2022 Review

status

What went well?

💪🏽  Indulged my love for fitness

January was a very focused month: I got super into fitness. Since I have so many fitness goals for 2022, I decided to dive in deep and set up habits and routines that I’d be able to rely on consistently for the rest of the year. My expectation was that learning and putting together a comprehensive routine would be time-intensive, but that once it’s established, it’d just be a matter of following the plan and being consistent.

Well, it’s been a month and I still haven’t fully made the transition to the “coast and execute” stage. Some reasons why:

  • I tried to pursue all my goals at once (planche, front lever, handstand, bouldering) and each one has its own deep rabbit hole
  • Since I’m also trying to cut body fat, I’ve been spending more time learning about nutrition and that alone was often all-consuming
  • With injuries, I had to learn about rehab and how to train more sustainably
  • Outside of researching and learning, actually following through (tracking calories, working out, cardio, cooking, eating) takes a lot of time
  • Lower overall energy due to cutting means I’m able to do less in a day

I feel like I’ve been training as if I’m trying to become a professional bodybuilder or athlete, with almost all of my time and effort this month being spent on something fitness-related. Not going to lie: It’s been ridiculously fun. Getting stronger is fun; looking better is fun; experimenting with creative ways to get a ton of protein is fun. (Protip: Putting xanthan gum into a protein shake turns it into protein ice cream which is * ~ super yummy ~ *)

But I’ve definitely been overdoing it, both in terms of the stress I’m putting on my body as well as the time it’s taken away from everything else in my life. So going forward, I plan to scale back the intensity a bit and just trust that being consistent over a long period of time will get me to my goals.

👨🏻‍🍳  Cooked a lot more

Since I’ve been cutting weight, I’ve been restricting my calories and coming up with ways to stay satiated even on a calorie deficit. At some point, I discovered that eating vegetables is the ultimate hack: you can eat 4 cups of broccoli and feel ridiculously full and it’ll only amount to about 100 calories. Every day, I’d try out some new cooking method or a new spice from Trader Joe’s (my spice cabinet is now the mirror image of their spice section because I own every single one). Then it expanded to include other veggies like carrots, asparagus, cauliflower, etc. and then at some point, I found myself buying specialty products like soy curls and cooking batches of lentils and tofu.

I invited my sister over for dinner one night and spent the most effort on preparing a meal than I ever have before. It paid off: she was incredibly impressed and thought it was super delicious. And it was! Still not sure whether to be offended or flattered that she kept asking me if I made everything myself instead of buying it pre-made (to be fair, it was only about a month ago that my diet was almost exclusively Huel and protein powder, heh).

I’ve started to enjoy cooking and experimenting with different foods. In my younger days, I’d sort of discount cooking as a worthwhile skill to develop because it was so ephemeral: once you ate it, it was gone. I was much more interested in building web products, writing blog posts, and producing things that could be shared with lots of people and last. In other words, I only valued marketable skills and disregarded everything else.

Now, I find a lot of joy in simply playing around in the kitchen and trying new things. I imagine this will also ebb a bit like with my fitness obsession once I start devoting more time towards other activities, but I’ve really enjoyed building confidence in my cooking ability.

What didn’t go well?

🤕  Got injured due to overtraining

It turns out that training 6 days a week and trying to progress across a billion skills while also trying to lose a pound a week is maybe not the best idea. Who could’ve guessed? Near the end of the month, I started suffering from a host of injuries, with everything from my fingers (strained pulley) to my wrists (pain when making a fist) to my forearms (forearm splints from planche training) to my elbows (slight tendonitis) breaking down and having issues.

As a result, my training quickly ground to a halt, and I realized that I need to be patient and train much more sustainably. I’m stubborn and am eager to progress, so this has been a humbling lesson. As much as I’d like to have a body that I can push and push without limits, these meat suits unfortunately don’t work that way so I’m grateful that I’m learning now about how to treat my body well and train much more safely because this will pay dividends for the years to come.

💩  Slow progress on Browserflow

Given that so much of my attention was sucked up by fitness this month, I made much less progress on Browserflow this month than I would have liked. But! Two good things:

  1. I still made some progress and released a new version (v0.9.3) that includes bug fixes and support for looping through pages where the URL doesn’t change, a scenario that many users have struggled with
  2. The business kept growing…!

Here’s the MRR graph over January:

Between December 31 and January 31, MRR grew 40%+ from $2,700 to $3,800!

The fact that I can focus on something else for an entire month and still have the business grow is mind-boggling. This is the end-state that I’d been trying to build for the past year and a half: a business that runs and grows without my direct input. Basically, I wanted to build a business where I wouldn’t be trading my time for money but rather have the investment of my time and effort pay dividends. This is not to say that I don’t want to work on or improve the business (I’m investing in Browserflow for the long haul), but I want to get it to the point where I don’t have to — that is, I’d be able to disappear for chunks of time (e.g. meditation retreats) without having the business crash and burn.

Even though this past month was a nice taste of divorcing time from money, I don’t think I’m quite fully there for several reasons:

  • I don’t have any long-term sustainable marketing channels (e.g. SEO)
  • I’m still involved in providing support whereas I’d like the documentation and tutorials to be so good that it can be 99% self-serve
  • Retention is poor and I’ve yet to make it easier via product and documentation to integrate Browserflow into larger automations (e.g. via API)

Still, this is very encouraging. I still have the mindset that something is dying if I’m not working on it, which is clearly not true but it’s based on the time-for-money / need-to-always-be-growing mindset that most of us are conditioned into. This month was a nice reminder that that’s not actually true.

Goals

Since I have concrete goals for this year, I think it’d be useful to list them out on every monthly review to talk about my current progress. Also, it’ll be a nice way to regularly remind myself of the things I wanted to accomplish when I inevitably forget about some of them!

Work

  • Reach $10k in monthly recurring revenue

    • $2.7k → $3.8k
    • Progress: $3.8k / $10k = 38%

Writing

  • Write a monthly review for every month

    • You’re looking at the first one!
    • Progress: 1 month / 12 months = 8.3%

Fitness

  • Reach 10% body fat

  • Complete at least three V6 gym bouldering problems

    • 😭 Training on hold due to strained pulley
    • Progress: Climbed a soft V5 before getting injured

  • Hold a frog planche for 5 seconds

    • 😭 Training on hold due to forearm splints

    • Progress: Tuck planche for 13 seconds (so… < 10% there given how much harder it gets as you work through the progressions)

  • Hold a straddle front lever for 5 seconds

    • Progress: Adv. tuck front lever for 8 seconds

  • Hold a freestanding handstand for 30 seconds

    • 😭 Training on hold due to forearm splints

    • Progress: Practicing toe pulls

  • Do a middle split

    • Progress: Haven’t started = 0%

  • Do 5 muscle ups in a single set

    • Progress: Haven’t started = 0%

Dancing