Issue #18

Recently I’ve been struggling to get motivated to progress on my own projects.

I’d feel overwhelmed with the number of things I could be doing so instead I’d do nothing.

This would then lead me to spend my evenings scrolling through Instagram or watching YouTube videos (neither of which helped me to progress).

Instead, it leaves me feeling even worse and questioning whether any of these things I want to do are even worth doing in the first place (like writing this newsletter).

Maybe you can relate to this?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think working every hour of the day is a sustainable, productive way to go about things, but I enjoy these side projects of mine.

But compared to the ease and stimulation that comes with scrolling through Instagram or watching YouTube videos – they don’t stand a chance.

The solution was simple – make it harder to access these stimulating apps (basically remove them from my phone).

Without them, I had very little to distract myself with.

It took a couple of evenings of staring at my screen, for my brain to get to a place where I could focus.

But on the third day, I managed to build out this entire newsletter section on my website – which included automating my income section to pull from a single data source and generate the graph from that data.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

There are still so many things I want to do, so stay tuned for my next newsletter on how I get important things done.

I very intentionally have 2 active clients at the moment.

Balancing my time between being active with my kids, daily exercise and other interests whilst delivering projects to a standard that I’d be proud of means having to say no.

One client is my ongoing relationship with an agency – we’ve done some super cool work this year and the entire team is so talented and nice to work with.

One project was for Sanity to create a fictional brand to showcase some new features they’d released in their May event.

My second client – this is the 3rd project I’ve done in the past 2 years.

We’re using Dato for this project, it’s not a typical page builder site but instead makes use of structured content which is far more interesting in my opinion.

Things have been slow on Stryve for the reasons mentioned above…

But a little while ago I had this idea for hands-free cooking, the idea was that whilst in cooking mode you could ask your device to:

• Go to the previous/next step
• To read the instructions of the current step
• Ask it how much of a certain ingredient you need

I have a working concept for this, it still needs some more work to provide the user feedback whilst it generates the audio response from Elevenlabs.

Time will tell how useful this feature will be, but it was fun to build and took ~2-3 hours to implement.

This month I’ve also started working with a business coach to try and figure out what I want out of life and this whole freelancing thing.

Even the best athletes have coaches – so in business, it also makes sense to invest in someone to help you along the way.

Part of the coaching includes 12 coaching calls (which we’ve booked weekly), so far we’ve completed one where I defined my 20-year vision, 3-year vision and a couple of goals for the next 12 weeks.