Goals for November 2018

[CCarter]

"Stop fucking around"

How far can you go with a 100% push daily? What about hourly?

Accomplishing one big thing towards your goals is nice, but how about doing 8 things, one per hour, that push towards your long-term and short-term goals?

I've gotten into a slump, comfortable a bit too much, in the last several months. So I talked to the team and want to do something a bit different for November and December goal threads. I'm going to challenge myself, and challenge YOU to do at least 1 thing to 8 things, that push towards your long-term and short term goals.

An I'm not talking "busy work" or things that you normally do, I'm talking about doing activities in addition to what you are currently doing, what currently makes you comfortable therefore moving outside your comfort zone drastically.

If you attempt this how far do you think you can push your business, your health, your well-being, and the things that are important to you in the next 60 days or so (Until 2019).

What I'm going after is a radical transformation to shock the system - My whole internal system, workflow, communication flow, and overall well-being. Will I succeed, don't know, but we'll find out. I'm going to be posting daily goals, objectives, and the serious things that got accomplished towards my goals.

I hope to make sure it's always a variety of things, and not just "coding XYZ" - which it's been for the last several months for SERPWoo. The objectives have to move the needle - even a nano-meter.

November is a special month for digital marketers due to it being the month most people make the most profits. We got Thanksgiving Week, Black Friday, Thanksgiving Weekend, Cyber Monday - people are just literally making up names for days/weeks to sell their goods now-a-days, but it's working. Anyways - now it's time for us to get to serious work!

Make sure you review your October 2018 Goals and check off what you accomplished and reflect on any failures - it's time to harp in on those overall 2018 goals and see what you can do to bring it home.

And remember @Satvrn's words of wisdom: "Stop fucking around"

P.S. One of the biggest motivations for my long-term goals is to make sure when I'm 60, 70, 80, or 90 years old - #1 I can walk and be active, but #2 that me and my wife aren't going to be bagging groceries (if that's still a job) in our senior years. A lot of people simply don't think that far ahead, they barely think 5 or 10 years ahead and ask what they want for themselves. Most people don't think past next week or next paycheck, that constant living on the edge won't scale well in the digital realm.

I cannot for certain say that in 10-15 years I'll be able to make a living on the internet, it changes so rapidly and so fast, it's hard to barely keep up. Will I even have the energy or motivation to try and figure things out?

So I have to grind extra harder now, save up more money now, and invest wisely now, so in the future I won't have to worry as much about where my next meal is coming from.

So if you don't have long-term or short-term goals - or ANY goals, NOW is the time to sit down and ask yourself what you want from this world and how do you plan on getting it. And when you are give then choice of doing some activity - ask yourself whether it aligns with your goals or not. If you have no goals, you'll be like a leaf blowing in the wind, it'll be taken any and everywhere that external forces dictate.

 

[CCarter]

Nov 1st: Got a list of obligations I owe people, even shit that's extremely late and gathered what I needed. Even small things like follow ups are all listed. Plan is to knock this out of the way within a day even if they don't response or care anymore. There are multiple big ones, some even terrifying but it's gotta get done.

Nov 2nd: Started sending out obligations to everyone to mentally clear my mind. I knocked out 4 small ones, working on a semi-big one now.

I have 2 small, 2 big, and 2 mega-big ones to go till all obligations are complete. The 2 mega-big ones are money ones, so those 2 will move the needle the most in the next 60 days, others are favors.

One things I'm concentrating on going into 2019 is simply not doing any favors for anyone or attempting to create new obligations for myself. The mental energy is draining but also I've been doing things backwards. Why am I adding value to someone's life project without anything in return - nice guy Carter is dead. Add value to my life first then I'll reciprocate - I used to be like this all the time, but something changed and not for the better.

When you are doing business with someone adding value first makes the most sense before asking for anything in return - I've done this and have been successful, why then do I not follow this in my own life when someone wants something from me?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Oh, so we're on that daily reporting now! Dig it.

The Big Picture
This month I want to be 100% done with the 25 money posts (over halfway there) as well as finish organizing the rest of a project with some other people. My parts are done. Any free time beyond that will go towards tying up some other open loops I want closed. And what's non-negotiable is leaking around Cyber Monday & Black Friday and getting fat paid in that 3-4 day span.

Nov 1st
I don't recall completely. I had to fix something on the big site I built. I learned that in every case you can in Wordpress development, loop by the ID and not the slug or name, even if you need to add a bit of overhead. It'll save you trouble. In this case I did it with no overhead, but still. I also worked on a huge social media push, manually, so much so that I got rate limited for an hour, then came back and hit it so hard I got rate limited for 24 hours. I did a few other things but that was the bulk of my day.

Nov 2nd
I finally had another brain melt down where it simply refused to work. I fought it for the first part of the day and then accepted it fully and did literally nothing but click around on the net the rest of the day. After so many weeks of not taking real weekends off, this happens to me and I've learned to let it happen. I did get back to that social media push once I was un-limited again, since it was brain dead work.

Nov 3rd
This is today. I had my break and now I'm geared up again and about to bust ass until later and may go grill out some steaks with the bros. My goal is to knock out at least #15 of the 25 money posts I've been blathering about, as well as touch base with my emails and BuSo.

 

[darkzerothree]

The last months were hell.

I don't even know where to start, so much shit happened. From family drama to health issues to accidents.. what the f...?
On the other hand, good things happened, big opportunities coming up, etc..

While my day job is still doing OK, anything else was just getting crazier by the minute.

But kept a clear head and powered through.
Now everything seems alright, but holy..

On that note...

November goals
Finalize all the work on Floating Elephant.
Start fitness again, lose weight.

 

[CCarter]

Nov 3: Tons of work on a web site design project's a bit behind. Fueled by nothing but Cafe Americano or Cuban Coffee - the former is "espresso light" the latter "espresso 10x" - powered through and made a break through in a design concept that hasn't been done within the industry - which is a bit perplexing.

Nov 4: Had to basically scrap the last 2 weeks worth of coding for a feature and rewrite it from scratch. Mega brand website was also rounding the corner but the client has last second changes SMH. The whole weekend was pretty much a lose. It was an extra brutal day today.

 

[Encrypted]

I'm not good at sticking to goals and that's why i rarely comment on such threads on the internet.

I can plan something today and do a 360 tomorrow ; still working towards the final goal but maybe using a different method or strategy or doing something different altogether.

That said , i'm willing to give this month a try.

SITE 1 :

This is a 10 months old website i started January 2018 that is doing pretty well. My hard work at the early stages is gradually paying off and my goal for this month is to keep things flowing and solidify my position in this niche.

- Cross $1,000 in monthly revenue : This site made roughly $700 last month and has experienced month over month growth in revenue since it made its first $ in June.

My goal is to hit the first $1k month. I believe it is on track for this as it has made $104 in the first 4 days of this month.

- Publish 2 Money articles : I have a couple of low compt. money keywords i'm yet to cover. My goal is to write and publish them before middle of this month and hopefully , get them in the top 3 position of G search before christmas.

- Acquire 4 new links : I've been sending around 5 - 6 quality links per month to this site in the last 4 months. I'll like to maintain velocity by sending 4 more links this month ; 2 niche relevant (from hobbyists bloggers) and 2 from other related niches.

- Setup email & social media pages : I'm heavily reliant on G for traffic but i see an opportunity for social and email promotions (my niche is highly engaging). So i plan to set them up and see how far i can go.


SITE 2 :

Site 2 is a fresh site that i want to make my #1 focus in regards affiliate ventures next year.

This website is very limited and covers just one topic but the products sell for around $400 - $1,500. They have a high commission (8%) with good search volume and people buy them a lot. So there's huge potential here.

- Further niche analysis to find areas where i can add value and help the community
- Full site setup. Structure , design , plugins , e.t.c
- Extensive keyword research to find low competition keywords.
- Write and publish first article.

 

[BCN]

Work:

- Finish my setup in Airtable. It will take 1-2 days. I organize everything in there. Almost done.

- Audit the affiliate sites I own to boost revenue up to 500-1k per month per site again, and then flip them early next year. I have no passion for building content sites anymore for the purpose of affiliate revenue. I sold one already. I pull all the ranking data and landers to Airtable, and go through the onpage, find link prospects etc. This will take me 3 days (it's 8 websites).

- Get my offline business to break-even, this is ongoing. We will increase spend on Adwords, and I will need to go through my outreach list to find good partnerships.

- Launch my ecom site, it's almost done, just need the final parts.

- Spend more time reverse-engineering working campaigns, and improve my launch strategy. This goes along with the first point on top. I need to do that first for this point to be a more valuable use of time. I need the system to effectively break things down into pieces, without it will just turn into procrastination.

A lot of these goals are a path to break down and split out the various items I call work, and which makes me an income and puts food on the table. Outsourcing "my websites" is hard -- outsourcing a site audit with a form that feeds into airtable is easy. Telling a VA to add any campaign that has parameter A, B and C, but not D, is easy.

Personal
- Spend less time on social media. I've almost cut it out completely, but I need it for the networking for my offline business, as a large amount of the leads come from our FB page, or from talking with local influencers on Facebook. I need to establish a balance here. I've also realized that social media gives you a very biased view on the world. Everything there is either too positive (escape from reality) or too negative (bullshit news, racism or negative millennial BS on how the world is fucked up).

- Spend more time outside. I live on the beach, but rarely go for a walk along the beach anymore. I waste my time in front of the computer. When I worked for someone else, I'd go outside (didn't live on a beach then, that's improved), read a book and spent more time disconnected, which made me more productive and happy.

- Keep getting up early, been getting up at 6-7 every day, and at least gotten a good chunk of work done by noon.

- I devote part of my work hours to learning new skills, mainly coding. However, I will spend this time more wisely and not look at cool things to build, and just build and let it break, and then figure it out. I have a few projects I'm working on.

Equally important, this work (it does make me money) will be done in my less productive evening hours when I come home from my office.

- Spend more time with my wife

 

[Ryuzaki]

Nov 4th
This was Sunday. I did a wee bit of work casually, did chores, watched the catastrophe that is the Walking Dead again with a friend. Low key day to refresh.

Nov 5th
Finished another money post and managed to have time for dinner with 3 college friends since one just moved back to the state.

Nov 6th
Finished another money post and managed to have lunch and vote and watch the chaos of the results coming in. Stayed up too late doing that.

Nov 7th
This is today. I've checked in on emails and taken care of receipts and all that papework and am trying to see where I can contribute to BuSo today. Then, I'll promote the past 2 money posts on social media and spend the majority of the day hammering out another money post. I need the last of these 25 done. 9 to go!

 

[CCarter]

Nov 5: Finalized the website and the mega brand is now presenting it to investors. Now just waiting on next round of edits (really final), then can cross this off the list. Nothing left to do on this.

Worked on the next major feature of SERPWoo, a bit long over due, but it's bit technical to make it smooth. What a lot of people don't realize in programming is: it's extremely difficult to make things easy for users - but if it's smooth and they don't have to think about it then you've won.

Around 3pm my brain went dead. Too much Cafe Americano and Cuban Coffee - brain just shutdown, had to sleep till 8am the next day.

Nov 6: Off Caffeine for a while, back on the grind but a bit slower. Worked on the SERPWoo new feature and attempting to finalize the code.

Looking back I still have 5 obligations to take care of, need to attempt to finalize them at nights cause they are long-term goals and need to be attended to.

Nov 7: Today was back 100% in focus mode. Blazing through the SW feature, hopefully can make an announcement in the next 1-2 days about it.

New problem is Thanksgiving is right around the corner and we need to start implementing a marketing campaign focused on that at some level. Problem is it's contingent on a couple of things that need to get finalized. Overall stress level through the roof, but progress is being made. Today should be my last "just coded" day for a while.

 

[CCarter]

Nov 8th: Lots of customer service done and an attempt to finalize a new SW feature. The day was mostly a blur since I was preoccupied with some outstanding obligations in the back of my mind, I dunno why I can't simply cross things off the list like a normal person - until its off my list it won't leave my mind.

Nov 9th: Day was a bit more grueling cause I ran 4 miles in the morning, lifted weights for about 2 hours, then ran another 4 miles at night. One of those long-term health goals that simply had to get done. In between there was a lot of clarity to finding a solution to a current programming problem - but I held off till the end of the day to get to it. I do love coding when it's crunch time the most for some reason.

Nov 10th: I was in no shape to move due to results of the previous day's workout regime, so that left me a lot of time to catch up on code and customer service. One thing that's burning in the back of my mind is Thanksgiving and the holiday season coming upon us still. The week before Thanksgiving is a crucial point since so many marketing campaigns go into preparation mode - and The Amazon stunt from last year side-swiped a lot of PPC campaigns. I got wind of it real late cause I wasn't on the ball, but I have a feeling this year they've got another trick up their sleeves. I respect Amazon's hustle probably more than any other company.

--

P.S. The reason I'm able to give detailed notes on what I did on these days is because I keep a daily journal of all important activities. I started doing that since October 15 2015, and have a log of everything I've done daily since then. It sounds crazy, but it allows me to keep my work ethic accountable but also I have massive amounts of notes in the daily journals (simple text files by dates), and what I worked on and what improvements or problems occurred and how they were solved.

If I didn't have these daily journals 90% of bugs for software would take 3x as long to solve - cause who know what the freak happened to this one server whenever - ya know! But this way I know I last messed with this server on this date and installed this weird library and that seems to be the day the data started getting screwed up - and therefore go figure out what's going on, or if there are external factors.

Not all the days are detailed or great, but after 30 days of doing it daily the habit is there and helps me at least understand the things I work on and what I perceive as important. If I look back for a year and see what I worked on versus what I think are important aren't aligned - then I know I need to change something of my ways.

I'll admit I could work a lot more, but working a lot more doesn't necessarily mean getting better results. It's a problem that the "Time for Money" mentality doesn't understand. If I can fix a problem for $X amount of dollars, and it takes me 5 mins - should I waste another 55 minutes pretending to work cause the client "wants to get their money worth"? Look at it from a medical standpoint, if you were in surgery and the operation costs $15,000 - do you care if the doctor takes 15 minutes to fix it or 20 hours to fix it - most people would want to get it over with and know the problem went away. The problem in consulting industry clients don't seem to understand that they are paying for expertise rather than time.

In my scenario my company is the client and solving a solution usually takes more "thinking" versus coding - so when I'm lifting weights or running I'm still programming thinking about a problem, and I should internally consider that as work too and not feel bad that it took me 5 minutes worth of work to fix a problem - there are 20+ years of coding experience behind that fix that were needed to even arrive at a solution. Something to think about.

 

[eliquid]

October 15 2015

Jeez, I dont even know what I did November 3rd 2018.

Guess I need to really start journaling more. I just put notes in Notepad++ and cross out and delete.

 

[darkzerothree]

Nov 13

Things are moving in mysterious ways.
Setting up a new avenue with coders in Eastern Europe (that I know personally) and interested parties over here.

 

[CCarter]

I'm not exactly sure how 10 days went by - but:

Nov 11th: Tons of customer service went down this day. Found a new glitch with a user input so had to spend time debugging and fixing that. Almost completed with the new feature that is suppose to launch "SOON" - but the code is extremely complicating. One thing I will say is we've got a process to successfully deny all junk emails (temporarily emails - 10 minute emails), even if a new temporary email domain is registered today. It should quell resources allocation to bad users.

Nov 12th: With the increase usage in mobile devices, we've started exploring ways to make parts of the interface more mobile friendly, but that's going to take a lot of time and effort. It's easier to make an interface mobile friendly on the next round of updates, then go through panel by panel since realistically mobile usage of SERPWoo is nearly impossible if you are looking at a SERP chart - simply rank tracking it's possible, but in order to really make something mobile friendly you have to strip away alot of functionalities, then figure out how to add them WITHOUT dumbying down the power. Anyways in that effort the new interface I'm working on within Quantum is "more" mobile friendly starting today, than in the past, but we are still along way from serious mobile usage - the question is do we even want to ever get there?

Being Saturday I spent a chuck of the day going through project goals removing some ideas that have no real merit in usage. Not all ideas are good ideas nor should be explored; it will cause delays in more important features and take us on a tangent that's not necessary for our end goal.

Nov 13th: Had to fix a mega bug for about 3 hours that was causing an GUI error when a new user created a project but that project had no data yet inside. The Quantum bugs are getting less and less, which is great news - but as usually they tend to push deadlines back which is never great for anyone. Another 8 hours of programming went into the new feature - mostly refining the code and attempting to catch potential errors before they happen.

Nov 14th: Ran 4 miles in the morning - helped clear my head. Most of the day was spent continuing programming on the new feature. It's starting to bother me more and more that "programming" is consuming so much of my day. In the back of my head I'm still holding onto those outstanding obligations - I need to just ax them ASAP, just to clear my head.

Nov 15th: Worked on a client project that's opening 3 locations, so this project is pretty immediately. Lots of changes, lots of "non-decision", meh. I started working on a blogpost towards "Marketing Tactics" - not sure exactly where I'm going to post this or when it'll drop.

Nov 16th: Ran 8 miles in the afternoon and did an hour of weight lifting. Majority of the day was dedicated towards back and forth with client and getting their project to the finish line. Had to do a long late night coding session but it's complete. Just wanting for "2nd round of final edits" - lol, smh.

Nov 17th: Finished one mega obligation finally. Had to "end" it one way or other. Lingering in my head is more trouble-some. From now on, the automatic answer to any requests from anyone is "No". Life's a lot easier that way - if it's not a part of my short-term or long-term goals I can't help them.

Nov 18th: Woke up to a whole lot of drama within a group I'm a part of - Meh... this is one of those things that I choose to participate in cause it's a bright side of life, but the drama... lord. Eventually I just blocked all the drama out and focused on finishing this new feature. It feels like I've been working on this for years at times, but it HAS to roll out right, otherwise it'll be a dud. It HAS to be easy from the beginning - otherwise it will be a dud again. It'll also allow us to attract a portion of our target audience that we feel has been lacking.

Nov 19th: I spent the majority of the day re-evaluating and re-aligning internal company goals, personal goals, and workflow. Something just feels way-off or not working. It took @eliquid re-affirming what I felt needed to be "concluded" on how I work, life works, and how successes have happened in the past. The feeling that I need to get rid of obligations is still lingering, and one thing I cannot allow to happen is to go into Thanksgiving weekend with these things hanging over my head.

 

[darkzerothree]

Nov 19th:
Met in the evening with the guy who wants to partner up for two projects.
Both are in the software realm.
One is a SaaS, in the gastronomy business.

The other one is based in some hardware, but the real part is the software.
This is in transportation / delivery.

He wants to partner because he has the connections, but no developers .. while in IT, his specialty is networks / hosting business, not software development, where my expeertise is - and I have ~6devs available in Eastern Europe.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Anyways in that effort the new interface I'm working on within Quantum is "more" mobile friendly starting today, than in the past, but we are still along way from serious mobile usage - the question is do we even want to ever get there?

I'd think the email notifications should be enough for mobile. I'd imagine you could make it responsive enough to do sideways tablets, but vertical tablets and mobile phones, I wouldn't bother. Who is realistically doing that much heavy lifting on a smart phone? If you're digging that deep into data, I wouldn't think you'd be doing that on a phone. I could be very wrong. I'd let the data inform you, as always, though. I know tablets these days have bluetooth flexy keyboards and all that now.

In the back of my head I'm still holding onto those outstanding obligations - I need to just ax them ASAP, just to clear my head.

Yeah, open loops absolutely destroy my brain's RAM and CPU power. They're just running processes that never close until they're done.

I've NEVER been able to close all loops and operate like others seem to do, with flexibility and being able to follow inspiration and the muse. I'm always pulling things out of to-do lists. It's a shitty way of doing things. I'm on a mission to simplify as much as possible lately, to try to escape this.

 

[eliquid]

Trying to remember everything I did......

Day 1 -
Getting myself ready for 2020. Yeah, I said 2020.
I can't get there if I don't plan, so I starting breaking away all the barriers I know I have mentally and physically. Started with getting every bill I have paid until Feb 1st 2020. Meaning, paid up my water bill in advance, electric in advance, phone in advance, HOA dues in advance, etc... paid off any and all credit cards, got all cars serviced ( major services, etc ), etc. Now I don't have to worry about paying a bill on X date or things that need to be done pushing me mentally out of my focus bounds. Rest of 2018 and all of 2019 should be distraction free from those tasks. Some people ask me why I don't just auto-pay these bills, but that brings up the whole mental block of making sure I have enough money in X account to cover it on that day. I have like 20 checking accounts and money moves around a lot in all of them. It's just better to pay everything off and have it "done" for the next 16 months then even try to think about it. Also worked on SERPWoo core code to get it working better and not error out.


Day 2 -
Working on fixing issues and finding optimizations ( by testing ) on one of our core parts of SERPWoo. Without this, everything else breaks down. Everything is reliant on this core code. I have to think like engineer at a Fortune 100 company, while also balancing the "whats the end goal" of a C-level exec to find the best outcome to make it a win-win for us and customers.


Day 3 -
My weekends are pretty much dedicated to work I couldn't get done during the week. A lot of this is low level stuff that only takes 15 min here, 1hr there and a lot of it focuses on things outside of SERPWoo like PPC clients, collecting thoughts on trying to finish up a book I am writing under a pen name, reading things I missed but saved in tabs, and getting my inbox to ZERO and cleaning that up in email ( unsub from newsletters, etc ). I also spend more time with family. I spend most of the day catching up on things leftover from the work week.


Day 4 -
Needed to get things done for the supplement company I partly own. Things are a lot slower here than any other work I do, mainly because its a lot simpler but also because a lot of things depend/wait on another person or company ( like filling our bottle orders ). Took product shots and got 2 Wordpress sites with WooCommerce ready and up.


Day 5 -
Getting ready for road trip I gotta make to South Carolina. Son is coming out of boot camp in Ft Jackson and then off to more training in Missouri. Will spend most of the week offline not getting much done but core tasks early in the morning or late at night. Have to pack, prep, notify, and other things so I can be offline and spend time with family mainly for the next 7 days. Gave new work load to my part-time VA so my PPC clients don't see Im not available and think Im just ignoring them.


Day 11 -
Exhausted, but back home. Spent most of the day sleeping but started BACK coding on a new feature for SERPWoo that I had to drop for some time to get another bug/issue sorted out that is a core part of SERPWoo. Most of the day was planning out and beta coding.


Day 12 -
Dealing with major brands is exhausting work, but the pay is good. It really surprises me the level of intelligence that gets hired at major brands that have no clue what they are doing. Spent most of the repeating myself non-stop to a client that doesn't listen and will cause their campaigns to hit the shitter based on their own ignorance. Oh well, thats why I charge the big bucks upfront.


Day 13 -
Coding on core part of SERPWoo to ensure we have resources in place daily to perform the work we do. Had to make a major decision on a long standing "no negotiations" procedure and decided to change it. Feel better about the choice and it has helped this bit of code. Also dealt with cleaning up more mental roadblocks like having to pick which healthcare plan we take this year and also some legel/business stuff like renewals on several LLC's with attorneys and firing someone on the supplement company side of things.


Day 14 -
Last minute repeated poor planning by others, shouldn't constitute an emergency on my end. But that's how the consultant money rolls in, right? I got this one PPC client that always seems to think the world revolves around them and that sending in last minute hurry up ( and waits ) is all I live for. Thinking about really ditching this client and have for years. Actually have a few times but somehow they keep coming back. The money is good though. Thought about training my part-time VA to handle, but these last minute things never fit a SOP. Spent most of the day dealing with their BS and coding on new SERPWoo feature.


Day 15 -
Power out due to ice storm. Can not do anything.


Day 16 -
Power still out, cant do anything. Popped shoulder out of socket trying to cut off main water line to house. Lie on snow and ice in pain for a while and curse the ground. Finally make way back into house which is just as cold as the outside temp. Had to bring in logs for the fireplace and tend to that every 40 minutes.


Day 17 -
Half of the day the power still out. Thinking about leaving the house and staying at Hotel. Power comes back up later half of the day though so I start coding on new SERPWoo feature. Also had a new idea for a new agency based on some obscure but readily available strategies in PPC and geo-location/IP targeting. Made notes and shared with a partner I have in PPC that owns an agency about the idea, process, flow, gotcha points, target clients, case studies, etc.


Day 18 -
Coding on new SERPWoo feature still. Its amazing the stuff you learn over years and working with another person like @CCarter . I find myself coding new functions into this new feature and I constantly go back and see how we did it in SERPWoo ( older code ) and how we do it now, and then think about issues we had and now how to avoid those. It takes longer to get the code done, but things just work on first code try now when I write it and also most errors and issues are future proofed too based on our prior hiccups and issues we encountered. For example, instead of logging our errors to a file or database, Im just logging the errors to Slack. I get notified in real time in a system I have up 24 hours a day and Slack is logging it for me.


Day 19 -
Coding on new SERPWoo feature. Had to spend time outdoors tending to the lawn. Its amazing how poor other business people run their business. I called 4 landscapers over the past week to come do leaves in my yard and NOT 1 called me back after 7 days. Not 1! So I am having to fire up the leaf blower and spend hours outside blowing. I have a big year, and even bigger piles of leaves. This will takes days to complete. Set up PPC campaign for new supplement we are bringing out and had to code up some API code for fulfillment company that mails out our supplements.


Day 20 -
Coding on new SERPWoo feature. Still blowing leaves. Reviewed all my code for this new SERPWoo feature and still finding bits and pieces that need to be fixed to future proof and make better. Coded out logic for the database that will solve a headache we had at SERPWoo regarding sharding of customer data. This new logic will make things a lot easier potentially, but it's because the data flow is different than at SERPWoo. Watched a some of my crytpo profit sink down the drain because I didn't follow my own trading rules and got sloppy. Oh well, will need to get back in the saddle with that.


Day 21 - Today
I use to cook for Thanksgiving and the day before ( today ) would be my prep day. That or we would go to someone esle's house. However, we are doing something different that we started last year. We paid someone else to cook for us!. For $200, we paid someone to cook us 2 Thanksgiving meals.. 1 for tonight, and another for tomorrow. I go pick up the food later tonight. Gotta blow the rest of the leaves too ( and I'll finally be done ) and then a few small PPC projects ( mainly check-ins ) and code some more on new SERPWoo feature to be ready for Beta testing next week.

.

 

[eliquid]

Day 22 - Thanksgiving
Hustling even on the holiday. Ate 1 of the dinners last night, ate the 2nd one today. But still working on new SERPWoo feature and supplement company stuff. Didn't blow leaves, gonna save that for the weekend and then be done. Coding new feature for SERPWoo to make sure nothing fails, code is clean and commented well, and can start preparing for it to handle massive amounts of data and workload. Tested some new trading setups for daily trading in my portfolio.


Day 23 - Today
Today is all about making the new feature for SERPWoo able to handle massive amounts of data quickly. Testing out Redis setups, multi-curl processes, failovers, API flows, etc. Need to plan for upgrades to lots of servers in the coming months too. Going to be a beast. Going to break for some Ramen or Pho and then back to finishing up the logic so this can scale out of the gate for MOST tasks.

 

[darkzerothree]

Day 19-24
Working on the high level architecture, featureset, MVP and MMP setups for these two projects.
Trying to wrap my head around various financing / revenue models, as well.

Actually got myself a new ipad Pro in 12.9 inches when they came out.
Was unsure about how it would improve my work, but this thing is a beast.

Might write a review of different apps sometime.

 

[darkzerothree]

Nov 25-30
Banging out specifications and wrapping my head around the revenue streams, cash outs, and reserves for each project.

Here is my thoughts so far:

Gastronomy
Cash ins

• Onboarding and configuration
• Bookings
• Monthly fee

Cash outs:

• Server and hosting costs
• Maintenance
• Further development
• Marketing

Reserves

• Emergency money
• Server replacements

Transportation
Cash ins

• Onboarding and configuration
• Hardware installation
• Entries
• Monthly fee

Cash outs

• Server and hosting costs
• Traffic from hardware SIM
• Maintenance
• Further development
• Marketing
• Storage for hardware
• Hardware

Reserves

• Emergency money
• Server replacements
• Hardware replacements under warranty

Edit
I just remembered my visit with one of the guys who owns a job board in Switzerland.
I was actually doing some SEO consulting for the guy to see where his portal could improve.
All through the talk there were random, but distinctive PING noises coming from his computer.
Finally, I just had to ask: "What is that noise?"
He just grinned and answered "That's a new ad by a company looking for a new hire. 100 bucks every time it pings."

Ping, ping, ping, ping........, ping..., ping, ping...

 

[darkzerothree]

On 30th deep in the night....

Looking at entities and their relations, mapping this to channels, and a user role/rights model.
Still hammering away at the specifications to give to the partner and then the devs for estimation.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've been going at it at a new level. I'm finally starting to see my main project in a new, clearer light.

I went into Trello and added some new things I had planned to do as a main plan of attack and then tacked all of the lingering things all into one checklist and have been going at it. I deleted 147 posts to see if content pruning can yank me out of this plateau I've been in. This also served to vastly simplify my workload, removing other lingering checkboxes. It made the site make much more sense too. It took a while to map all the content to clicks and impressions in the SERPs, sort out what I wanted to keep or not, move posts to other categories and map the 301's, and then I saved all the "bad content" to build a web 2.0 out of to give myself a fat branded site-wide link later.

This led to me re-organizing my sidebars. I finally got email optin's on a certain set of posts that I hadn't worked out, and I increased their visibility site-wide. I also re-did my category pages to show more posts per page to minimize the amount of indexation bloat going on. I can increase that again later if needed now. I added author boxes earlier too as part of this design big campaign.

I'm halfway through the checklist. I'm going to implement lazy loading now that Google said they can handle it if you do it a specific way, and I also need to figure out something for my header menu in order to get users more easily into my sub-categories (especially on mobile since sidebars drop to the bottom). I'm also going to place some ads on some pages I hadn't yet due to using them for linkbait. There's a couple more items still, but all in all this should vastly improve my user metrics and hopefully quality score and lead to a boost is SERP visibility and ultimately revenue.

I'll let it bake after all that and push more quality content, but ultimately I'm going to start split-testing since the design will be completely done at that point (5 years later).

 

[CCarter]

Nov 20th: Started using Slack more to monitor critical systems of SW infrastructure. Webhooks allow us to monitor errors faster, and more importantly GUI interface problems that cause users to get thrown errors. Went Thanksgiving shopping and checked in on a real estate property my family owns.

Nov 21st: Lite code work in the morning - took the rest of the day off to get ready for the holiday and weekend. Ran some more errands.

Nov 22nd: Took the day off, spent day with wifey and her friends.

Nov 23rd: Did a mega round of server updates and maintenance work, and cleared up some dead code from the code base.

Nov 24th: Created a nodejs bot that allows me to clear slack channels for messages that are over 7 days old (Based off of this code: https://gist.github.com/firatkucuk/ee898bc919021da621689f5e47e7abac). Did a 2nd wave of updates to over 30 servers - maintenance is a bitch.

Nov 25th: Did 3rd wave of updates to the final set of 30 servers. Got rid of tons of dead code and scripts laying around.

Nov 26th: Created new scripts that handle the workload of nightly maintenance that are done, and updated some older scripts that needed to be upgraded to higher versions. The actually maintenance of a growing system is a full-time job in itself. Did some research on a new versioning system to implement in the coming months to help streamline the code base more.

Had a meeting about workflow and how to overcome some of the issues we've faced this month and within the last year, as well as look into the future for 2019. Thinking about a new schedule that falls in line with ways to launch features in a more organized scheduled fashion along with marketing material to coincide.

Nov 27th: Worked on a real-time bug for users that was critical. Some users using special characters would get a weird error that on the old interface when attempting to make a certain update. The bug only exists on the old interface since the new interface does the processing completely differently. However this episode tells me it's more critical to get everyone off the old interface so we aren't maintaining 2 interfaces for users creating double the work.

Nov 28th: Worked on updating a feature for email verification within Quantum Interface. Updated a ton of GUI panels to implement a new system health monitoring solution. The newer way interfaces with slack more as well as sends out more critical information within text messages to us if the system goes down or a part of the system starts crashing.

Nov 29th: Updated some reporting modules that needed to be updated for Quantum to fully go live without anymore issues. The backend is nearly 100% done, while the frontend had 3 features missing that are critical to sun-setting V3.

Nov 30th: "ALMOST" finalized this new SW feature, but found another bug that took me out of commission for 4 hours. However I think launching is sooner rather than later after this last series.

--

Overall I consider this month a failure. A ton of obligations were removed or taken care of but some of the critical components I wanted didn't.