
I quit contracting 6 months ago - michael_forrest
https://coda.io/d/I-Quit-Contracting-6-Months-Ago-Heres-How-Im-Doing-With-Charts_dt6Kk4hYMa1/I-Quit-Contracting-6-Months-Ago-Heres-How-Im-Doing-With-Charts_su9Nw#_luPVu
======
ping_pong
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
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.

~~~
ggggtez
The advice doesn't seem friendly, and ignores valid points. I agree with the
above poster. The article is long and meandering.

Let's raise some specific complaints:

>So if you see "2 days 18 hours" that means "66 hours total time spent on this
activity".

Completely superfluous. He goes on for 3 sentences explaining that a day
contains 24 hours. WOW! AND he couldn't figure out how to keep his units, or
make it unitless.

Chart 2:

>Here's how my work week tends to break down:

We break down the day into 4 time frames. Why? When does each timeframe begin
and end? If the time is for a "work week" then why the hell does "monday"
contain almost 200 hours? That's for 6 months, you say? Why?! It should be an
average for a work week! No one intuitively knows how many hours occur on
mondays over a 6 month period. Is that a lot of hours, or a few? You would
have to do some mental math to even interpret this chart.

Chart 3:

>stacked bar graph

Enough said. It's impossible to comparatively interpret stacked bar graphs
over time. You want to use a line graph when you want to compare things over
time. Tell me, did he spend more time podcasting on 7/21, or the week after
that? "Obvious!" you say, "he spent more time! It's clear!" Look again,
however! The next week is 7/28, but the next _label_ is 8/18\. What? Where is
7/28? The labels are seemingly randomly distributed, with no rhyme or reason!
Eventually you find 7/28 and lo-and-behold... they _look_ about the same, but
had to mouse over it to check, didn't you? Because they are separated
vertically by nearly the entire chart.

And we didn't even get around to Happiness 3.0 Make a Change App Activity,
which contains 41 distinct labels, and you can only read 3 of them at a time,
and has all the same problems as the above... Or the Instagram chart that
seems to contain _the entire message_ as the label? Does an instagram post
take 4 hours to make? What does this chart even mean?

Let's not sit here and suggest that it's "friendly advice" that a person isn't
being helpful when they don't defend every statement they make. Anyone who
tried to read this, actually read this, would immediately see that these
charts are garbage and nearly meaningless. They probably make sense to the
person who made them, but as a method of conveying information in a blog post
to others, we can criticize without writing a dissertation about the mistakes
here.

^ unfriendly advice

~~~
setr
curiously, that third graph for me has order 7/7 7/14 8/18 8/25 7/21 8/4

If you didn't mistate the dates, then it might even be _changing_ its random
distribution :-)

------
michael_forrest
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
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
Love that :)

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psim1
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
>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
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.

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

------
jborichevskiy
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
Same. Just followed Michael on youtube.

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

~~~
sombremesa
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
> 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
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.

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

~~~
Redoubts
> I still can't make any money

------
davidwparker
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...

------
geuis
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.

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

~~~
mft_
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.

------
alex_g
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?

~~~
michael_forrest
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.

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

------
quickthrower2
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
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
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.

