Getting into the nitty-gritty

Hmm. It seems I’ve skipped a few days’ worths of writing. This day–day eight–is many days later than the last post I put out. I missed days five, six, and seven. I intended to write every day for at least the first thirty days. I’ve already broken that goal.

Now that I think about it, however, these days all kind of blur together. I tried to write day five’s post but couldn’t recall anything that was significantly different from this day. Same too about day six. So I guess I can go ahead and write about today, and you, dear reader, can assume the previous three days were very similar.

These are the days when I’m building a lot of routines in my day. There’s a lot to do as I step into the office each day, so I’m finding success in my habit now of filling my calendar with hour blocks of work to do. Between 9 and 10 am, for example, might be “Client 1”. And between 11 and 12 might be “Blog post.” I fill my calendar with reasonable things to do in a given day.

I like this method: there is no check to fill in on a checklist. There’s simply “let’s do this work at this time.” There’s less pressure to complete something; rather, I’m just working towards completion during the time block.

Of course, I don’t have to spend just one hour on a particular client or post; I can easily bump into the next time block by moving the other around. Those little squares in Google Calendar do not intimidate me, as does a check box :)

I’ve started to color code blocks not by client or project but by their upcoming due date. If “Prepare for User Group” has a due date (it does: 12/14), then I color it red. This flag shows me I shouldn’t move it to another time block but work on it as planned.

I’m building routines in my day to keep me busy and to be productive. As I am the business owner and employee, I need to do those business things that are distracting. I’m finding, however, that I enjoy doing those.

Along the business side, this is what I’ve accomplished this week:

I got a bank account (finally) with Wells Fargo. I decided to go old-school for now instead of an online bank.
I set up a Freshbooks account and started tracking all client (and internal, business stuff) time there. This will be useful to send clients an invoice, which I’ve already done.
I settled on various services I’ll be using. Since I’m doing and planning different marketing activities, I need various online services to support that. Some of those will be front-facing (facing you, my hopeful customers), and some are the internal stuff. I’ll share more about plans I have in the future.
I did a lot of client work. Probably 30+ hours so far.
I have gathered all my business expenses so far.
Oh yeah, and I set up my website. I am playing with NextJS and TailwindCSS to build it. This is taking a lot of time, but it is so much fun.

So that’s what’s been going on. I think next week (starting 12/13), I’ll write more about JavaScript in FileMaker and other technologies. If you haven’t yet, please sign up for my weekly newsletter. I’m still working out the overlap (or lack thereof) between that and this blog post. For now, I’ll keep writing whatever where ever. I’m sure it will eventually work itself out.

Magically Yours,

Jeremy