Day 23: school sucks

Been really busy the past few days nursing my sinus / flu (no idea which it is) This is all on top of a midterm exam I just finished on Monday. Now I’m off to rushing a 1500 word ethics essay. I’m not sure what’s the value of all these homework.

in order to pay the bills and save up for a possible 3 months trip to China at the end of this year, I’m working part time as a semi-remote software engineer. This job pays me on an hourly basis so I have to clock my JIRA tickets using an app called Clockify. When I start working on a ticket (which is usually for a feature on an app we’re building), I’ll start a task on clockify and a timer begins. When I’m done with the ticket, I stop it. At the end of the month, I send this to my CEO/CTO and get paid by the number of hours I’ve worked. I think I’ve worked around 12 hours for this week so far. My goal is to work at least 30 hours a week but this is proving to be very difficult. School assignments and exam preparations just keep taking up my time and mental energy.



When I think about how to hit 30 hours a week, it’s actually rest difficult because I’m not working full time. This is probably just an excuse because people do work full time and still get their freelance gigs and side projects done after work. Or maybe I should just stop procrastinating and just sit down and code. Tickets in, clock out.



I’ve also been doing some thinking on how I can manage my time better. It helps a lot to follow Ryan kulp’s way of “if it’s not on google calendar i won’t do it”. So now I try to setup blocks of time and stick to focusing on doing that one task (this is where I have to be mindful about my attention)



putting this into practice means I block out 1.5 hour blocks for my part time dev work. Then try to complete tickets within that block.



The 30 hours per week is stressing me out so I won’t do that. I’ll try to get 20 hours per week first (this stil pays me decently week) and do more after I complete my national service — well, because no more school!





haven’t got much for my Young Makers side project done. I’ll strive to block out 2 hours daily to work on it. At least I’ll be able to get work done bit by bit.

I notice I read a lot of articles when I’m procrastinating. I should stop this?



or should I turn this into an opportunity? maybe build a way to save my links systematically. It will periodically send my micro community for business reads on telegram.

Serendipitously I came across getsaasweekly.com through Louis Nicholl’s indie hackers link to a question on Newsletter Geeks telegram chat. The question was on how much should the newsletter operator charge a sponsor — someone is actually interested in sponsoring such a newsletter!



this made me think. He’s just aggregating some interesting SaaS articles and sending a weekly newsletter for that. Why not I build a tool for people to do this. At the same time, I should allow people to discover which links intersect in which newsletters? Maybe allow people to start conversations about each interesting article? But where should these convos be? How do they know someone’s conversing about it? Not everyone uses telegram...



I can’t help but keeping on imagining possibilities.

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