[addictedcs]

My goal for the next year is just to work fewer hours. Covid pushed my work habit to the extreme, and I need to rebalance.

1. Read more books, less social media/news.

2. Spend more time with my friends. I haven't seen some of them IRL for more than a year.

3. Exercise more, play tennis with my daughter, spend quality time with my kids.

4. Spend more time with my parents. They've become visibly older in the last years, an observation that scares me.

5. Focus more on marketing for the businesses that I've bootstrapped. All the shiny new features that are developed are not as important as getting more people to use your product.

6. Promote open-source project to 1k GitHub stars[1]. I know it isn't very meaningful, but it's just nice to receive a bit of recognition from the community.

7. Enjoy life, don't stress about all the little things that happen along the way.

Happy new year!

[1] https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting

[gbear605]

(Not trying to criticize, just curious)

Are the open source work and the business marketing part of/all of the “work” that you want to do less of? If so, what is your plan for balancing doing less of it while still trying to accomplish those goals?

[addictedcs]

I'm really not good at marketing. Essentially I have to learn how to do it first. I plan to spend more time learning this new skill and then applying it. I've been recommended this [1] course, and if anyone can recommend something that worked for them, that'd be great.

Balancing it with other duties is going to be hard, though I will try to explicitly divide my time into "one-week marketing / one-week dev work." Inside each week, I will try to have days fully reserved for non-work activities.

Programming keeps me in this perpetual cycle of "one more thing for today/this week" which locks me in the IDE without end in sight. I will postpone any dev work that needs to be done until "dev work week" arrives.

[1] - https://devmarketing.xyz