The Inner Workings [journey]

[Conor]

14 August 2017

I often find myself spontaneously planning big things for my life, getting excited for half an hour and then simply resuming the daily grind, never to give those "big plans" a second thought. When I say "big plans", I'm not referring to something ridiculous, like "Buy a Ferrari and move to France". I'm simply talking about stuff I'd enjoy doing with my day. Stuff that would make me happier. This includes both business and leisure related things.

Why would I just forget about stuff that could potentially make me a happier person? That's an excellent question. My best guess would be because of laziness and the flawed way in which I prioritise tasks in my head. I'm the type of person who likes to start something and not stop until it's done. This means that jobs that take weeks or even months to complete, tend to use up the majority of the time I'd otherwise spend doing recreational activities such as eating breakfast or going to bed.

This journey is one of my afforementioned "big plans". It'd make me happy to document my daily activities in a totally non boring way. Obviously no one wants to hear about what cereal I ate that morning, but thanks to the whole "skipping breakfast" thing, we're already one step ahead.

Usually a good journey tends to have a beginning and a destination, a clear "Point A" and "Point B". Otherwise it's not really a journey, just aimless wandering through an unfamilliar environment. This journey will be a good journey, at least in that sense. My "Point A" will be 14 August 2017, and "Point B" will (hopefully) be 14 August 2018. The journey itself will comprise of the majority of the days in between those two dates.

So what will my journey be about?
That question is slightly harder to answer, but I'll assume that because you're still reading, you've got some time on your hands. Firstly, a better question to ask would probably be "what's the point of this journey?". If you haven't noticed already, I tend to prefer the left side of my brain when it comes time to use it. I like logic and order and for things to make sense. I like to set goals for myself and to achieve milestones along the way. Going back to the beginning when I spoke about "big plans", I'm hoping to use this journey as a motivator to achieve some of these big plans. I'll be documenting these goals in my journey and then describe how I plan to achieve them. I've just set a recurring entry in my calendar for 5pm every Monday: Contribute to your journey.

So now that the formalities and attempts at justifying my extremely valuable contribution to the internet are out of the way, let's get to the fun stuff.

What do I want to achieve?
Someone smart or famous once said something along the lines of "don't ever do anything for free, or else". I took this to heart when I first heard it, because it resonated deep inside my soul. Growing up, I hated the fact that I didn't get paid to do schoolwork. Why couldn't my teachers figure the maths problems out themselves? They probably owned a calculator too. In that sense, I'm almost taking a step backwards with this journey. I'm not expecting to get paid for it. I've already spent just about an hour typing this thing and I've earned exactly R0 (South African currency) for it. The reward here is obviously on a much higher, much more cliche level.

Imagine a Mr Miyagi or Yoda like figure, describing enlightenment and wisdom and a sense of self pride. That's what I want to achieve here. I want to look back in a year and say "Wow, just look at what I've accomplished". And being the logical, orderly human that I am, all the things I've accomplished will be listed out neatly in front of me in the form of this journey.

So there you go.

I'll be writing an update once a week for now, and perhaps more frequently once I've got the ball rolling. So without further ado, my first goal of this journey:

Goal 1
Write 1 journey post per week on Mondays after work.

My non goal related plans for this week:
I am in Nelspruit (A part of South Africa) for the majority of this week visiting family. This means I'll need to work from my laptop until I get back to Johannesburg (Another part of South Africa). Not too much of a problem, I find I actually tend to be more productive working from my laptop while listening to music on the couch.

I have a website to finish designing for a client, but I'm waiting for content for that, so I've put the job on hold until I hear back from them. I have some content to add to a different website right now, as well as a sort of currency calculator I need to convert to a web based form from an excel spreadsheet. I quite enjoy that type of work, it tends to be more challenging than simply copy pasting content from a PDF.

I have been hoping to also find more international leads when I get back home. Local clients are great but $ looks so much nicer than R.

Goal 2
Find international leads.

Final note:
I wish I had drawn some of the amazing drawings you see in this journey. Alas, being left brained, I lack the skills required. Credit to the authors, whoever they may be.

 

[W9go]

good luck .... what is your aim ???? did not get it overplaying your posting

 

[Conor]

good luck .... what is your aim ???? did not get it overplaying your posting

I just want to have a means of tracking my weekly goals and motivating myself to keep making and achieving new goals I suppose. I want to have at least 52 entries this time next year with a bunch of things I've accomplished. I want to be able to write down what I'm planning, see where I went wrong if I do happen to go wrong, and then try something better. You could almost think of this journey as a case study of sorts. "The life and times of a 25 year old South African guy".

 

[W9go]

I just want to have a means of tracking my weekly goals and motivating myself to keep making and achieving new goals I suppose. I want to have at least 52 entries this time next year with a bunch of things I've accomplished. I want to be able to write down what I'm planning, see where I went wrong if I do happen to go wrong, and then try something better. You could almost think of this journey as a case study of sorts. "The life and times of a 25 year old South African guy".

good luck

 

[SH-M]

Will be following this, good luck.

 

[what_hat?]

I loved your introductory post, OP. You indeed seem to favor your left brain. I'll be following your journey.

http://bigthink.com/overthinking-everything-with-jason-gots/your-storytelling-brain

 

[umerjutt00]

May the force be with you.

 

[SEO FOX]

Nice Journey. Following buddy.

 

[Conor]

21 August 17

Wow, has it been a week already? How time flies. I've had a productive 7 days though.

I worked for what felt like 7 or 8 hours non stop, on both Wednesday and Thursday. I had to get some content uploaded to a client's site which had been due for a long time; I was quite proud myself once it was all up. I drove back to Johannesburg a couple of days later than I was hoping to, but I got to spend some time with the family, so no complaints there. I ended up arriving home on Friday afternoon and just lazing about for the rest of the day.

In contrast, my weekend wasn't a completely lazy one. I got a haircut for the first time in 2 months, and then did some quick work on Sunday evening, as well as manage to rekindle my interest in Dota 2 (I hadn't played in probably 6 months up to that point).

Today was a good day too. I went to a meeting with a new potential client at a local coffee shop; I'm fairly certain I got the job. Despite my general disdain for meetings, I tend to get the job 95% of the time after meeting the client for coffee. I have a stack of empty energy drink cans piling up on my desk to testify toward my late nights, as if they needed an actual literal depiction.

As for my goals, here's the progress to date:

Goal 1
2 journey posts down, 50 more to go.

Goal 2
So I did manage to find some international lead sources. In fact, I even posted one of them in one of my other threads earlier today. But I'm not too sure about how well I, as a "foreign" person will be able to market my services to members of these groups. Why hire a guy from a 3rd world country (me), when there are people right around the corner who can do the same job? I'm going to have to do a little more searching here. I did manage to find some good local sources though, so I feel like I've made some progress there.

Goal 3
Time for some new goals. I debated putting this one up, as it's neither productive, nor work related. But this journey is about achieving things, so here goes. I've decided to get a couple of like minded friends together to start playing Dota 2 more competitively. The eSports scene in South Africa is growing, and I know a few half decent players who might be interested. I've got nothing to lose but time, after all.

Goal 4
Quick one, just to challenge myself this week. I (rather unsuccessfully) decided at the beginning of the year to read more books throughout the course of the year. Now, 8 months later, I've barely made it through half a book. So I've decided that I'm going to attempt to do something different with these late nights I've been having. I plan on completing one book by the time my next journey post is due. That's 28 August. The late nights I've been having are not always productive ones, so I should be able to do this fairly easily now I've set my mind to it.

My non goal related plans for the week:
So I've now got two clients who I'm waiting for instructions from, before I can continue with their websites. Not too much of a hassle, as it gives me time to focus on other projects. I also started "improving" my earnings spreadsheet a couple of weeks ago, as I got sick of logging all my earnings in as "hours", rather than just the exact amount of money I'd earned. My original spreadsheet worked amazingly when I was only doing maintenance work, which I could charge an hourly rate for. It didn't work so well when I needed to log hosting and non "hourly rate" stuff. I've also been sent a ton of PDFs by one client that I need to upload to their site over the course of the week. While I'm generally not fond of long, straightforward "page population" work, this should be a nice bit of money to end the month with. I usually invoice regular clients on the 25th of the month.

Final note:
I'm interested for feedback. What do you guys like to do outside of work that makes you feel more fulfilled? Any goals or activities I should consider?

 

[Conor]

28 August 17

Phew, we're at week 3 already. The ball that is this journey is finally rolling nice and steadily. The past week has been a busy one. The 25th is invoicing day, and today is "rent paying" day. Now that that's out the way, it's smooth sailing for the next few days until debit orders go through at the end of the month.

Most of my time last week was spent planning a sort of eLearning system with a client. Not bad work at all, but slightly counter productive as I'm essentially setting up an alternative "easier" eLearning system for them, because they found my initial setup too complicated to add content to. Progress is being made though, so nothing to worry about.

I read an interesting article about the link between positive thinking and being productive and achieving things in life. It was a good note to end the night on, I tend to wake up feeling more productive when I read stuff like that.

I also finished making some changes to my earnings spreadsheet today. It was a mission getting some stuff to work, but I'm very happy with the way it's turned out, if I do say so myself. I love being able to keep a log of my work and to see my total earnings for the month and how they've improved over the previous month.

How have my goals been looking so far?

Goal 1
Already established above. Good progress, moving on.

Goal 2
No progress from last week, but in this case, it's not a bad thing. I only look for leads when I have time to do so. I haven't had time at all, in amongst a lot more work from a couple of recurring clients, such as the one above.

Goal 3
I played a bit of Dota 2 over the weekend, chatted to a couple of guys who might be interested, more to follow in the next few weeks.

Goal 4
Could have been better, but I'm halfway through "3 feet from gold", as well as a magazine I'm just mentioning to make myself feel better. I must say, 3 feet from gold is a pretty easy read though, definitely recommended if you're looking for a little motivation.

Goal 5
This one is quite important, I'm not too sure why it didn't come up sooner actually. I was chatting with my girlfriend yesterday about being productive and setting goals, etc. Basically a suggestion that came up was to start putting away a percentage of my income whenever a client pays. It's a good suggestion, and so I've decided to add it here. I'll start small at 5% and see how that works out over the course of the month.

My non goal related plans for the week:
Still waiting for info from one client about their website. I'll follow up again tomorrow, she initially wanted the site to take 2 weeks max to finish, they paid me a deposit and I think I've been waiting almost a month now for the content. I'll be learning "Moodle" very very quickly for the eLearning site I mentioned earlier. Thankfully, I won't be doing the admin on the site, but I figure it'll still be good to know my way around.

Final note:
Shameless self plug, just because I'm proud of how it turned out. Here's my updated earnings spreadsheet: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/g...eet-earnings-calculator.890790/#post-10352309

PS: I hope this goes without saying, but those are not my actual earnings on the spreadsheet.

Edit: Final final note
So I decided to have a few friends over for the weekend to give Payday 2 a try. I'd only briefly played it in the past, but we all owned a copy on steam so I thought "why not?".

HOLY CRAP is it difficult. I think we played around 5 missions each 6 or 8 times, and we failed every single time. It was the most discouraging thing I've ever done. Don't get me wrong, the game is super addictive, but it's damn hard. Any hope I had of becoming a bank robber in real life has definitely been crushed by this game.

I hope none of you have a fear of clowns.

 

[Donestrgling]

Good luck following!

 

[Conor]

4 September 17

So I'm starting this post a little later in the day than usual. After the events of today, I think I might find myself dreaming in Javascript for the next few days. The client whose eLearning site I've been working on sent me a bunch of personality tests to add to their site. Not usually something I find very credible, but they were definitely an interesting challenge to convert from text format to an actual dynamic system. To make matters even more interesting, there was a Wordpress plugin that did EXACTLY what I needed, aside from 2 crucial elements that I had to try code myself. While I do have a fair amount of PHP and Javascript knowledge, I don't consider myself a developer in any sense. It took much longer than I was hoping to implement the changes, but I'm making progress and that's always a good motivator for me.

Today, I found myself coding an almost RPG style system where users were required to allocate points to various attributes in this particular personality test. I felt like a genius once things actually started working the way I wanted them to.

Aside from that, the week was a generally quiet one. I finished up with some projects I'd been putting aside for far too long, did a bit of gaming and went grocery shopping. Friday also marked the first anniversary of me living alone whilst doing web design full time from home. Thinking back, I would not recommend moving house to anyone who's considering it. That was the most stressful crap I've ever had to deal with in my life. In an ideal world, I'll be living in this house til my dying day, if it means I don't have to "move" again.

The goals are looking good too:

Goal 1
4th Journey post has been written. Good progress. Gold star for me.

Goal 2
I actually did find a bunch of new lead sources recently. Not all of them are great, but they're something. Another gold star.

Goal 3
I've been playing Dota more regularly in the evenings, with some regular guys. We have been looking for one last person to complete the team though, it's not quite the same playing a 5v5 game with 4 familiar people and one strange kid who just lets the team down.

Goal 4
I read more of my book over the weekend. I know I gave myself a week to read it, so I'm not particularly happy with the progress on that, but I am making progress which I suppose is something. Half a gold star for me there.

Goal 5
Nothing to report here. Once I've invoiced some clients, I'll be saving a percentage of that income.

Goal 6
A few weeks ago, I decided to set my PC to switch on and start searching for leads at 7am for me. Unfortunately, I've not had the energy to be up at that time to actually respond to those leads. Which is a slight missed opportunity if I do say so myself. So this goal will be a slightly complicated one, I want to either wake up earlier on a more regular basis, OR come up with a little bot that responds to leads on my behalf while I sleep. I like the second option, so I'll see what I can come up with this week.

My non goal related plans for the week:
My house needs a bit of a clean, the first of September being the first day of Spring and all. I want to add a few aesthetic tweaks to my earnings spreadsheet, and maybe make a new spreadsheet for something else, maybe to track optimal lead response times, and that sort of thing.

Final note:
I found a bunch of "motivational" wallpapers earlier in the week, as I was getting rather sick of the standard Windows stock photos. I'd love to know what other people have as their wallpapers though, or any recommendations (I know we've had that thread a bunch of times in the past, but hey). Anything I can add to my wallpaper library?

 

[Conor]

11 September 2017

So this marks the 9/11 in years I've been able to go about my business without seeing American flags and "we'll never let you forget" slogans everywhere I turn. It's also the first time in years I've actually sat at my PC and worked all day without turning on the TV, so that could be it.

In any case, it's been a semi quiet week. The elearning site finally got finished, I pushed out a few more invoices and got to work on some maintenance work for a couple of clients. Nothing fancy, but that's the work that usually tends to pay the rent for me, so I'm always happy to have it.

One of the websites I was monitoring for leads decided to change their system slightly, meaning I could no longer do very specific searches for the exact jobs I was looking for. Not a trainsmash, but it means a little bit of work for me later today, trying to work around it.

The goals are making progress, some faster than others but they're definitely moving.

Goal 1 (Write 1 journey post per week on Mondays)
Full steam ahead.

Goal 2 (Find international leads)
I don't know if I can ever complete this one, as there are always more lead sources to be found. In any case, I've found some more, so... Progress I guess.

Goal 3 (Start playing Dota 2 competitively)
Going strong, I've been playing with my team regularly on the weekends and in the evenings.

Goal 4 (Finish reading "3 feet from gold" within a week)
Obviously this one didn't happen in the time period I set for myself. But the book itself is getting finished slowly but surely. Fail.

Goal 5 (Put a percentage of earnings into savings)
Progress has been made here. I've put away 10% of everything I've earned since I made this goal. I'm proud of the results here.

Goal 6 (Automate lead responses OR wake up earlier)
This one is interesting. I managed to figure out how to get Distill to post every new lead via Webhook to a spreadsheet in Google Sheets. This could potentially allow me to filter the results with more accuracy and have some sort of bot that clicks the link in certain results and posts an automated response. However, I also found out too late that the free version of Distill only allows a certain amount of Webhook calls. I'm not paying for it until I'm happy with the way my spreadsheets are being filtered. I'll keep working on this one.

My non goal related plans for the week:
Full marketing mode. I will be spending the majority of my time advertising and bringing in as much new work as possible. I usually don't like outsourcing because I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to putting my name on things, but I might just end up getting some outside help with some tedious stuff to free up time for me to do other things.

Final note:
I had two ladies come in and help clean my house over the weekend. This isn't really related to anything, I just thought some of you might want to know I'm quite happy to be in a nice clean house again. While the house does tend to stay relatively tidy, there were some dusty surfaces and slightly off-white tiles that I just hadn't gotten round to cleaning myself. I'm enjoying being able to almost see my reflection in everything again.

 

[Conor]

18 September 2017

It's been a busy busy week with some ups and downs. My mobile provider decided to stop working this morning, so I've been unable to receive calls the whole day. Deep down, I'm not too upset about it. I never was a fan of phonecalls, and it gave me a chance to catch up on some work left over from Friday.

I spent most of the morning putting together a bunch of forms for a client in Gravity Forms. Those jobs are never as straightforward as I expect them to be, as I tend to find myself still working on the form 3 hours later, with 100 more fields than I originally intended. I did finish eventually though, and it gave me some time to work on my leads.

I had a few lead sources that had long been in need of an upgrade, in terms of the way I received my notifications about them. If anyone here followed some of my earlier posts on BHW, I started by monitoring some websites through IFTTT.com and having it email me, every time it found a new lead. This got tedious though, as emails were delayed and I didn't always have time throughout the day to keep an eye on my inbox. So, I decided to migrate all the important sites over to my new monitoring system (Distill), which notifies me in realtime whenever I get a new lead. It also allows for greater levels of filtering, which also took far too much time to do manually when I received them via email. So that's that sorted.

Goal 1 (Write 1 journey post per week on Mondays)
Still going strong.

Goal 2 (Find international leads)
Ditto on this. I actually deleted a bunch of useless lead sources today, but added a whole lot more better ones. So. Progress?

Goal 3 (Start playing Dota 2 competitively)
I chatted to a friend about becoming our "5th" over the weekend. Not sure if it'll amount to anything though, as he's not really a dota player. But for the time being, I'm more interested in getting people who are committed to learning and playing rather than people that already have a ton of experience but already do other stuff with their lives.

Goal 4 (Finish reading "3 feet from gold" within a week)
So close to finishing, it's not even funny.

Goal 5 (Put a percentage of earnings into savings)
Still going strong. Haven't skipped a payday yet.

Goal 6 (Automate lead responses OR wake up earlier)
I actually woke up earlier today, I'm proud of myself. The automation option is still my first choice though, and if I have to pay to get more webhooks, I'd rather find alternatives. Small progress there I suppose.

My non goal related plans for the week:
Invoice clients, possibly get some work done at a nearby coffee shop (my wifi is looking like it might run out early this month), and do a bit more reading now that my book is almost finished. I'm also wanting to put more time into gymming, as that's also been in hiatus over the past few weeks, and I'm starting to feel unfit.

Final note:
This post is probably the shortest one I've written so far. Not that I haven't done much over the past week, I've just been working on existing projects, so nothing new has really come up. For reading through this week's whole boring episode, here's the most random picture I could find on the internet:

 

[Conor]

27 September 2017

So I missed a post for the first time on Monday. Mostly because it was a public holiday and I spent the majority of the day thinking it was Sunday.

Once I realised what had happened however, it gave me a chance to re-evaluate this whole journey, and while I still plan on updating it as regularly as before, I feel like it needs a couple of changes, as it's not the most exciting read in the world at the moment.

So, watch this space. New goals, updates on current goals and a better layout coming soon (next day or two)!

 

[issorc]

I read through the whole journey the first time right now and found it to be very interesting and inspiring, keep it up