6 ms·

I quit contracting 6 months ago

michael_forrest 7y ago
I've been tracking my time in great detail as I work on various projects and I am hoping others will find this interesting!
- N_A_T_E 7y ago
  Impressive list of projects in parallel. I'm impressed with your drive to get so much done. My experience has led me to believe that the average person has trouble starting and actually finishing (shipping) projects. Best of luck!
- sombremesa 7y ago
  This was definitely an interesting read, and I'm sorry to say that I wasn't surprised with your results. I've been trying something similar, with the exception that I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria. This saved me a ton of time. More importantly - I just stopped doing those kinds of projects altogether. Why? Because you should do what you enjoy. Regardless of how much money you think it can make. Wasn't that the whole point of working for yourself in the first place? If nothing comes of it, that's okay. At least you enjoyed yourself. The worst possible scenario is that you do something you're not enjoying and also don't make money - you have total control over one of those variables, as your own boss.
  - ed 7y ago
    > I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria How do you find customers? (I.e. people with buying power, and clearly defined unsolved problems.) Being able to do so is a pretty valuable skill!
    - sombremesa 7y ago
      Almost everyone has some buying power and some unsolved problems, the issue is that most so-called problems are tolerable to an extent that people will not pay to solve them. I haven't solved this issue, which is why I use my trial and error approach. As for finding people to share your product with, it's very easy. If you had any hypothesis behind your solution, you can guess where your customers might be - and if you just approach these people (whether online or in person, such as what the Pinterest founder did), very few will refuse to give your product a try if you offer it gratis. Getting people to pay comes after getting people to love your product, and the latter is difficult enough that if you really did it you won't have to worry about the money.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  That was a blast to read, as someone else with far too many side projects (also struggling with the balance between prog projects and music projects). One theory of improvement would say you should subordinate all your resources to localizing/translating that app that already has a revenue foothold, because any additional revenue would then lengthen your runway before you'd have to go back to work.
- wakatime 7y ago
  Have you seen https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com? It would provide more detail into your existing tracking, and help with your goal of spending more time on productive projects.
Apfel 7y ago
This is a very interesting article, but hijacking middle mouse click to scroll made the experience of reading it pretty annoying.
- mft_ 7y ago
  Likewise - was very interested to read, but it didn’t zoom correctly on an iPhone. As soon as I tried to zoom to look more closely at the charts they disappeared, and on zooming out I then had a small scrollable window containing the content set within the larger page.
ping_pong 7y ago
Some friendly advice: your charts are almost impossible to understand. They may make sense to you, but they are utterly meaningless to most anyone else. I suggest that as you continue writing, you should take a step back and try to read it from the point of view of someone that has no previous knowledge of anything about you. This could help you focus what you write about and make things more succinct, because most people won't read a wall of text either. One other piece of advice is to cut down on what you're trying to do. Like you said, you have way too many projects going at once. Focus on a single project and stop worrying about trying to save the world. Dedicate 8 hours a day to the project and as you accomplish goals, move forward. Spend 1-2 hours a day exercising. And if you want to spend it on youtube videos, then use your 8 hours a day on that, but realistically that doesn't appear to be very promising. I took a year off about 10 years ago and I had a single project I worked on 8 hours a day. Once I spent 3 weeks just trying to increase the accuracy of my OCR from 93% to 98%. It's dumb, but that's freedom to pursue things just to learn. Take advantage of your freedom by focusing on the long tail, you can go very very deep into areas where you normally wouldn't have the opportunity.
- sicromoft 7y ago
  Some friendly advice: you called his charts utterly meaningless but didn't give a single specific issue you had with understanding them. While it would've helped to have unit labels on the Y axis, I was able to understand all of them. Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those problems.
  - lgg 7y ago
    I'll provide a specific issue I had, which is that the charts don't provide good units or labels. For example, on the Week by Week breakdown chart the vertical axis is labeled "Duration" and and has bars that range from 0 to ~2.0, but no units written there. Neither hours or days really make sense (hours are too short, and from the rest of the post it is pretty clear the author works more than 2 days per week). Now going back to look over the post to write this response I happened to mouse over the chart (something that I could do because I happened to be at my computer, but something I missed the first time on mobile) it actually showed me the values for each segment, and I was able to figure out what was going on. The units are days, but they are 24 hour days (since the entire post is about work schedules I would have assumed 8 hour days). That explains why the maximum tend to be ~2 (because 2 days is 48 hours). The chart would be a lot more intuitive if the duration was in hours, and no matter what the units should be labeled explicitly (in this case I would use "24 hour days").
jborichevskiy 7y ago
Very relatable to someone with way too many interests and too little time to pursue them all. Best of luck to both of us over the next six months!
- jordan314 7y ago
  Same. Just followed Michael on youtube.
Ancalagon 7y ago
That was a very good blog post, but it begs the question: how much time do you spend tracking/analyzing your time?
alex_g 7y ago
I'm most impressed by how detailed the tracked time is- what app or method did you use and how did you stick to it?
- ankit70 7y ago
  Second it!
- michael_forrest 7y ago
  A Coda document that evolved as time progressed. I had the idea of reporting back at some point motivating me to keep everything up-to-date.
psim1 7y ago
There is high value in pieces where the author uses himself as a case study in achieving something and provides a lesson for others to learn from. In this case, however, it just reads like braggadocio. What's the take-away for us?
- nck4222 7y ago
  >What's the take-away for us? My takeaways: 1. If your goal is to try and make money, being focused on one idea at a time is probably better than deep diving in to several narrow niches. 2. I shouldn't be discouraged by not (yet) generating income myself. Despite lots of stories of success and people telling you otherwise, it's a hard thing to do, especially if you work a full time job. 3. I'm really glad I don't bother with the effort of micro tracking my time like this. On the surface it seems appealing but after reading this it seems like it takes a lot of effort, and doesn't provide much value.
  - xmprt 7y ago
    If things are working out the way you want them to then tracking your time won't help but if you're trying to find more time then having that information can help a lot instead of randomly deciding you're going to cut out more time playing games.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- itake 7y ago
  Take-away: Starting a business is hard. Contracting is much much much more profitable in the short term. I wish the author compared his contracting value creation with his project's value creation.
  - michael_forrest 7y ago
    One of the implications of "quitting contracting" for me is that I'm not letting myself compare anything to my contractor day rate. Suffice to say for the last six months, compared to contracting, my income has been basically 0.
geuis 7y ago
Site is nearly unreadable on mobile safari. Giant header, huge floating footer, had to rotate the phone multiple times to finally get something to render correctly.
tempsy 7y ago
I didn't see a single revenue figure in here...
- Redoubts 7y ago
  > I still can't make any money
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
quickthrower2 7y ago
Wow, a simple blog post that could be served and rendered to me in less than a second (mobile iOS) takes ages to load with a spinning disc, ages to render everything and some charts are lazy loaded when in view and take a long time, and an unresponsive scroll bar. I suggest get your posts on your own domain not this coda thing whatever that is. Stick on CDN hosting like netlify for free. Use simple images or svg. Eschew Javascript for showing static content. It’s was too slo to read so I didn’t. Example: https://superjavascript.com/t/typescript/ https://superjavascript.com/t/typescript/ - that loads fast! My connection speed and latency are good by the way.
- andrewingram 7y ago
  Coda is a knowledge base, much like wikis such as Confluence. It's mostly used inside businesses, so I imagine he just made this page public. Making it hyper optimised for anonymous web traffic is almost certainly a non-goal.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Sure, I am not saying Coda should change at all. I am suggesting that if you want to blog, and want people to read what you blog, to host it somewhere where it is readable on the widest range of devices. If a iPhone 6 with a 20Mbps mobile connection is too antiquated to render the site, then they are probably cutting out a lot of audience. I don't know Coda, so I'll use the Confluence (which you suggest is similar) as an example. If I am using Confluence it is because I have to, for work. I will make a provision that maybe I can't read it on mobile and I need to be at my desktop. If I am reading a blog post from hacker news, I probably wont go to the effort of bookmarking it later to read on a desktop PC.
  - michael_forrest 7y ago
    Exactly. I know it's an awkward and inefficient way to share a blog post but I liked the idea of people being able to explore all the data.
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michael_forrest 7y ago
Thanks for all the comments so far. I know Coda isn't designed as a blogging platform but I liked being able to directly connect the interactive charts. It's better on desktop than mobile. That said, I did spend quite a while copying it over and reformatting it for Medium this afternoon - there's a link right at the top - just in case people didn't want to deal with Coda! I would have liked to make the charts a bit clearer but the customisation in Coda is quite limited. Nobody I showed it before posting it on HN had any complaints. I can add some more context to the bits that aren't clear. As for how long I spend tracking my time... not too long really? I've been tinkering with my document here and there as I go, and now generally I just switch to the right project and hit "Start activity", pressing "Save" when I finish. I've been using Coda rather than bootstrapping (yet another) private time tracking web server because it provides a different sort of agility to what I'd get if I was programming everything myself.
- narag 7y ago
  There is a chinese proverb, at least that's what I was told it was, that says that if you want something done, give it to a busy man. It seems accurate to me. Someone that can deal with a lot of stuff is a good bet to accomplish a task. As suggested by someone else, I'm going to subscribe to your videos, let's see if I get infected :)
  - michael_forrest 7y ago
    Love that :)
davidwparker 7y ago
Thanks for the write-up. It speaks to me a lot, and serves as a warning for doing too many things rather than focusing on just a few. Side Note: as someone who already has a ton of graphics videos on YouTube already, you shouldn't expect to get a lot of views there...
ncmncm 7y ago
Hey I started expanding, about the same time, too. Past time to get back on the exercise program.

I've been tracking my time in great detail as I work on various projects and I am hoping others will find this interesting!

N_A_T_E 7y ago
Impressive list of projects in parallel. I'm impressed with your drive to get so much done. My experience has led me to believe that the average person has trouble starting and actually finishing (shipping) projects. Best of luck!
sombremesa 7y ago
This was definitely an interesting read, and I'm sorry to say that I wasn't surprised with your results. I've been trying something similar, with the exception that I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria. This saved me a ton of time. More importantly - I just stopped doing those kinds of projects altogether. Why? Because you should do what you enjoy. Regardless of how much money you think it can make. Wasn't that the whole point of working for yourself in the first place? If nothing comes of it, that's okay. At least you enjoyed yourself. The worst possible scenario is that you do something you're not enjoying and also don't make money - you have total control over one of those variables, as your own boss.
- ed 7y ago
  > I always immediately (within a week) found customers and handed the product to them, and abandoned the product if the response wasn't absolute euphoria How do you find customers? (I.e. people with buying power, and clearly defined unsolved problems.) Being able to do so is a pretty valuable skill!
  - sombremesa 7y ago
    Almost everyone has some buying power and some unsolved problems, the issue is that most so-called problems are tolerable to an extent that people will not pay to solve them. I haven't solved this issue, which is why I use my trial and error approach. As for finding people to share your product with, it's very easy. If you had any hypothesis behind your solution, you can guess where your customers might be - and if you just approach these people (whether online or in person, such as what the Pinterest founder did), very few will refuse to give your product a try if you offer it gratis. Getting people to pay comes after getting people to love your product, and the latter is difficult enough that if you really did it you won't have to worry about the money.
tunesmith 7y ago
That was a blast to read, as someone else with far too many side projects (also struggling with the balance between prog projects and music projects). One theory of improvement would say you should subordinate all your resources to localizing/translating that app that already has a revenue foothold, because any additional revenue would then lengthen your runway before you'd have to go back to work.
wakatime 7y ago
Have you seen https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com? It would provide more detail into your existing tracking, and help with your goal of spending more time on productive projects.

Apfel 7y ago

This is a very interesting article, but hijacking middle mouse click to scroll made the experience of reading it pretty annoying.

mft_ 7y ago
Likewise - was very interested to read, but it didn’t zoom correctly on an iPhone. As soon as I tried to zoom to look more closely at the charts they disappeared, and on zooming out I then had a small scrollable window containing the content set within the larger page.

ping_pong 7y ago

Some friendly advice: your charts are almost impossible to understand. They may make sense to you, but they are utterly meaningless to most anyone else. I suggest that as you continue writing, you should take a step back and try to read it from the point of view of someone that has no previous knowledge of anything about you. This could help you focus what you write about and make things more succinct, because most people won't read a wall of text either. One other piece of advice is to cut down on what you're trying to do. Like you said, you have way too many projects going at once. Focus on a single project and stop worrying about trying to save the world. Dedicate 8 hours a day to the project and as you accomplish goals, move forward. Spend 1-2 hours a day exercising. And if you want to spend it on youtube videos, then use your 8 hours a day on that, but realistically that doesn't appear to be very promising. I took a year off about 10 years ago and I had a single project I worked on 8 hours a day. Once I spent 3 weeks just trying to increase the accuracy of my OCR from 93% to 98%. It's dumb, but that's freedom to pursue things just to learn. Take advantage of your freedom by focusing on the long tail, you can go very very deep into areas where you normally wouldn't have the opportunity.

sicromoft 7y ago
Some friendly advice: you called his charts utterly meaningless but didn't give a single specific issue you had with understanding them. While it would've helped to have unit labels on the Y axis, I was able to understand all of them. Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those problems.
- lgg 7y ago
  I'll provide a specific issue I had, which is that the charts don't provide good units or labels. For example, on the Week by Week breakdown chart the vertical axis is labeled "Duration" and and has bars that range from 0 to ~2.0, but no units written there. Neither hours or days really make sense (hours are too short, and from the rest of the post it is pretty clear the author works more than 2 days per week). Now going back to look over the post to write this response I happened to mouse over the chart (something that I could do because I happened to be at my computer, but something I missed the first time on mobile) it actually showed me the values for each segment, and I was able to figure out what was going on. The units are days, but they are 24 hour days (since the entire post is about work schedules I would have assumed 8 hour days). That explains why the maximum tend to be ~2 (because 2 days is 48 hours). The chart would be a lot more intuitive if the duration was in hours, and no matter what the units should be labeled explicitly (in this case I would use "24 hour days").

jborichevskiy 7y ago

Very relatable to someone with way too many interests and too little time to pursue them all. Best of luck to both of us over the next six months!

jordan314 7y ago
Same. Just followed Michael on youtube.

Ancalagon 7y ago

That was a very good blog post, but it begs the question: how much time do you spend tracking/analyzing your time?

alex_g 7y ago

I'm most impressed by how detailed the tracked time is- what app or method did you use and how did you stick to it?

ankit70 7y ago
Second it!
michael_forrest 7y ago
A Coda document that evolved as time progressed. I had the idea of reporting back at some point motivating me to keep everything up-to-date.

psim1 7y ago

There is high value in pieces where the author uses himself as a case study in achieving something and provides a lesson for others to learn from. In this case, however, it just reads like braggadocio. What's the take-away for us?

nck4222 7y ago
>What's the take-away for us? My takeaways: 1. If your goal is to try and make money, being focused on one idea at a time is probably better than deep diving in to several narrow niches. 2. I shouldn't be discouraged by not (yet) generating income myself. Despite lots of stories of success and people telling you otherwise, it's a hard thing to do, especially if you work a full time job. 3. I'm really glad I don't bother with the effort of micro tracking my time like this. On the surface it seems appealing but after reading this it seems like it takes a lot of effort, and doesn't provide much value.
- xmprt 7y ago
  If things are working out the way you want them to then tracking your time won't help but if you're trying to find more time then having that information can help a lot instead of randomly deciding you're going to cut out more time playing games.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
itake 7y ago
Take-away: Starting a business is hard. Contracting is much much much more profitable in the short term. I wish the author compared his contracting value creation with his project's value creation.
- michael_forrest 7y ago
  One of the implications of "quitting contracting" for me is that I'm not letting myself compare anything to my contractor day rate. Suffice to say for the last six months, compared to contracting, my income has been basically 0.

geuis 7y ago

Site is nearly unreadable on mobile safari. Giant header, huge floating footer, had to rotate the phone multiple times to finally get something to render correctly.

tempsy 7y ago

I didn't see a single revenue figure in here...

Redoubts 7y ago
> I still can't make any money

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

quickthrower2 7y ago

Wow, a simple blog post that could be served and rendered to me in less than a second (mobile iOS) takes ages to load with a spinning disc, ages to render everything and some charts are lazy loaded when in view and take a long time, and an unresponsive scroll bar. I suggest get your posts on your own domain not this coda thing whatever that is. Stick on CDN hosting like netlify for free. Use simple images or svg. Eschew Javascript for showing static content. It’s was too slo to read so I didn’t. Example: https://superjavascript.com/t/typescript/ https://superjavascript.com/t/typescript/ - that loads fast! My connection speed and latency are good by the way.

andrewingram 7y ago
Coda is a knowledge base, much like wikis such as Confluence. It's mostly used inside businesses, so I imagine he just made this page public. Making it hyper optimised for anonymous web traffic is almost certainly a non-goal.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Sure, I am not saying Coda should change at all. I am suggesting that if you want to blog, and want people to read what you blog, to host it somewhere where it is readable on the widest range of devices. If a iPhone 6 with a 20Mbps mobile connection is too antiquated to render the site, then they are probably cutting out a lot of audience. I don't know Coda, so I'll use the Confluence (which you suggest is similar) as an example. If I am using Confluence it is because I have to, for work. I will make a provision that maybe I can't read it on mobile and I need to be at my desktop. If I am reading a blog post from hacker news, I probably wont go to the effort of bookmarking it later to read on a desktop PC.
- michael_forrest 7y ago
  Exactly. I know it's an awkward and inefficient way to share a blog post but I liked the idea of people being able to explore all the data.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

michael_forrest 7y ago

Thanks for all the comments so far. I know Coda isn't designed as a blogging platform but I liked being able to directly connect the interactive charts. It's better on desktop than mobile. That said, I did spend quite a while copying it over and reformatting it for Medium this afternoon - there's a link right at the top - just in case people didn't want to deal with Coda! I would have liked to make the charts a bit clearer but the customisation in Coda is quite limited. Nobody I showed it before posting it on HN had any complaints. I can add some more context to the bits that aren't clear. As for how long I spend tracking my time... not too long really? I've been tinkering with my document here and there as I go, and now generally I just switch to the right project and hit "Start activity", pressing "Save" when I finish. I've been using Coda rather than bootstrapping (yet another) private time tracking web server because it provides a different sort of agility to what I'd get if I was programming everything myself.

narag 7y ago
There is a chinese proverb, at least that's what I was told it was, that says that if you want something done, give it to a busy man. It seems accurate to me. Someone that can deal with a lot of stuff is a good bet to accomplish a task. As suggested by someone else, I'm going to subscribe to your videos, let's see if I get infected :)
- michael_forrest 7y ago
  Love that :)

davidwparker 7y ago

Thanks for the write-up. It speaks to me a lot, and serves as a warning for doing too many things rather than focusing on just a few. Side Note: as someone who already has a ton of graphics videos on YouTube already, you shouldn't expect to get a lot of views there...

ncmncm 7y ago

Hey I started expanding, about the same time, too. Past time to get back on the exercise program.