This is the personal blog of Richie Kastl. The point of this blog is mostly for me to become a better writer and to clarify my thoughts. It's to share what I learn as a developer, parent, husband, fitness dude, business person, landlord, and cheerful demigod. If you learn something from me then congrats, you get a medal.
Expect a new post from me every weekday. If I'm feeling frisky, I'll also do one on the weekend.
You are not just yourself, you are a whole community of people.
You are your past self, your present self, and your future self.
Also your future future self, yourfuture future future self, your past past self, etc..
Imagine yourself as a community of people all in one place.
All of the actions you take in a day affect the whole community.
Most people follow what Tim Ferriss taught in his book the 4-Hour Workweek.
In it, he recommends only checking email in short, intense bursts.
And now that is what is common among computer workers, and it is common to expect lagging response times.
If you have clients or a boss, reconsider this notion and be obsessed about responding quickly.
Blow their minds with how fast you respond to their requests.
This will set you apart from everyone else.
In the world of sales, the people who actually close the most deals are the ones who respond to leads the quickest.
We are always selling ourselves in every situation.
If you want to be a top performer, respond quickly.
Deep work is romanticized as a person sitting in a log cabin in the mountains working on their book using a typewriter.
You can smell the coffee and the hearth.
The keyboard clacks as each word effortlessly flows from their mind to the page.
Hours pass and they don’t notice.
Nothing distracts them from their work.
But deep work isn’t always like this.
Deep work is painful.
Much like a body builder at the gym lifting weights is in pain, but they know with every rep that they are getting stronger.
Deep work is the same.
It hurts.
You don’t want to do it.
But you need to do it.
And with every rep you get a little stronger.
I discovered a new note taking app.
Ian Carroll does a great job of explaining it in this video: https://x.com/Cancelcloco/status/1832145003952619838
“Meta studies are the same as astrology” - Scott Adams
Never believe a meta study.
The people who create the meta study pick and choose the studies that they include.
They are not going to include the studies that disprove their hypothesis.
One tool that I recommend for getting more done in less time is called Focus Blocks.
You can sign up for it here: https://2000books.com/focusblocks/
It’s a continous call that you can join at the top of every hour.
There are usually 20-30 people on the call and they’re all productivity nerds like you and me.
When you join, you declare what your intention is for the hour, then everyone goes and works as hard as they can for 50 minutes.
It’s a great productivity tool that also makes you feel less lonely.
This post is going to sound like a sales pitch for Astro, but I’m convinced it’s the greatest thing in the web development world at the moment.
I’m working on an Astro site right now, and let me tell you, it’s mind-blowing.
Here’s the great part about it - you can keep your WordPress backend if you want. Astro plays nice with everyone.
Astro sites are blazing fast. They use server-first rendering. It’s complicated stuff but it’s what makes them fast.
It sends lightweight HTML to browsers. No bloat, no unnecessary JavaScript. Just pure speed.
Astro is all about content-driven websites. Your products, your story, front and center.
Want to use your favorite CMS? Go for it. Astro doesn’t discriminate. It works with everything.
Customization? Astro’s got it in spades. UI components, CSS libraries - you name it, Astro supports it.
Now, let me introduce you to Astro Islands. They’re revolutionary. They optimize your site like nothing else.
Astro Islands are a unique feature of the Astro framework.
They allow you to add interactive JavaScript components to your static HTML pages.
These islands of interactivity are isolated, meaning they only load and execute when needed.
Core Web Vitals? Astro crushes the competition.
Zero JavaScript by default.
View Transitions.
Content Collections.
Actions, Middleware, the whole package.
It’s all there, ready to make your site amazing.
Don’t settle for slow, outdated websites. Be a trendsetter. Choose Astro.
It’s going to transform your online presence. Your competitors won’t know what hit them.
There is a silly youtube channel that I came across yesterday called “Prince Vegeta Motivation”.
It instantly recognized how persuasive this channel could be.
It’s a channel that uses an AI voice generator to create motivational videos of Prince Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z.
Here’s an example of one of the videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoTBGZskbbk
This channel has the potential to be a greater influence on gen z and millennial men than Andrew Tate.
Robert Cialdini’s (author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”) work on persuasion explains why this AI-voiced Vegeta will work.
Cialdini identified six key principles of influence, three applying strongly here.
Authority: Vegeta’s status as an unrelenting badass lends weight to his words.
Liking: Vegeta is one of the most popular characters in Dragon Ball Z.
Social proof: As the channel and views grow, the weight of the messages will increase.
One piece not mentioned in Cialdini’s work is the power of nostalgia, which this channel also uses.
The fusion of Dragon Ball Z, AI, and useful information creates a uniquely compelling content format.
It demonstrates how Cialdini’s principles adapt to modern digital content strategies.
The channel’s success could lead a whole generation to a better life.
Have you ever caught yourself scrolling through social media, completely unaware of how much time has passed?
You’re not alone.
As a programmer with 15 years of experience and a studying hypnotist, I’ve found a startling connection between technology and hypnosis that might just change how you view your favorite apps.
Imagine picking up your phone for a “quick check” of Instagram or TikTok.
Before you know it, an hour has vanished.
How does this happen?
You’ve just experienced a trance state more powerful than most professional hypnotists can induce.
While you’re mindlessly swiping and tapping, something is happening beneath the surface.
Your beliefs are being subtly reshaped by the content you consume.
It’s a process so smooth, you won’t even notice it happening.
You might think, “But I’m in control! I’m teaching the algorithm what I like.”
And you’re mostly right.
You’ll still get served content outside of what you like though.
These videos will entertain you, others will educate you.
You think that the app is useful, so you’ll keep using it.
This is where the real danger lies.
As your beliefs slowly shift over time, you’ll attribute these changes to your own volition.
After all, you’re the one choosing what to watch, right?
Right?
Scott Adams describes the simplest definition of persuasion as:
Attention + Repitition
Do you want to live longer? Eat more protein.
Doctor Peter Attia recommends eating 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.
For me, that’s about 200 grams of protein per day.
This was hard for me to do at first, but eventually I figured it out.
To achieve this, I do the following:
This ends up being around 2100 calories and 193 grams of protein.
Revivification is a process that hypnotists use for practice.
It is a technique that helps a subject vividly recall and re-experience past events.
Only use this technique for pleasant experiences, it would be very bad to do this with unpleasant ones.
I love checklists for almost everything I do, so I created one with the help of claude.ai
You don’t have to do every single thing on this checklist to get a solid revivification experience.
Before beginning the hypnosis process, gather information about the memory:
Set the stage for a successful session:
Guide the subject into a trance state:
Guide the subject through the memory:
Maintain and deepen the revivification:
Safely end the session:
Ensure the subject’s well-being and gather insights:
Prioritize the subject’s safety and your professional integrity:
I’ve been experimenting with Clickup for a while now and I’m pretty happy with it.
One of my agency clients turned me onto it.
I use it to keep track of every task that I need to do in a day, from business to personal.
I really like it because of the recurring tasks, it makes it easy to keep track of all of the routine tasks that I need to get done each day.
An example of this is that I like to look at an exit report for each of my clients at the end of the month.
That’s where I identify the pages that most people leave their site on, those are usually pages that need to be updated.
I don’t have to remember to do it, the task will just appear on my dashboard that day.
Overall I’d recommend it.
AI is so useful for monotonous tasks.
I have a task I’m working on for a client where I need to take a bunch of products that are in a HTML file and turn them into markdown files.
Doing this one by one would take hours of work.
But with AI, it takes much less time.
I can upload the HTML to Claude and ask it to extract the products.
Then I can ask it to format the products into markdown.
First immerse yourself in it.
Subscribe to YouTube channels, follow tik toks, follow X pages, whatever you need to do to get programming things in your face as much as possible.
Then go through the basic tutorials on sites such as codecademy or team treehouse.
Once you have a basic understanding, then do this next thing.
When I got my certification in copywriting, the instructor told us to find successful copywriting, and just spend a hour copying it word for word.
Do the same thing with programming.
Find the source code of a type of program you would like to work on, then copy it line by line, source file by source file, and really think about the code while you’re typing.
If you catch yourself zoning out, go back to the part where you started zoning out and go back to copying.
Tutorial sites such as codecademy.com are great for learning the basics and syntax of code and copying real-world programs will teach you how to structure code.
I just installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I had lying around and it is fantastic.
I tried using this laptop before for work but it was really slow, Ubuntu breathed new life into it.
Ubuntu saved me from buying a new $1k laptop.
I haven’t used Ubuntu since I was in college and it does everything I need it to do.
It is super easy to setup, it feels like a normal operating system, and installing apps using the command line is really fast.
I suggest taking a look into it.
Back in the day (before AI and even now), developers silo’d themselves off from each other.
We have the Java developers vs the JavaScript developers.
The Ruby on Rails people and the Swift people.
The C#‘ers and the C’s.
You get the point.
With AI, the Java developers can dabble into the JavaScript world and vice versa.
Sure a Java developer wouldn’t code up a JavaScript project as fast or as well as a full-fledged JavaScript developer, but they can do it.
The most recent project I’ve been working on is really heavy on Python, and I’m not really a Python developer, but I’m getting it done much faster than I would have before AI.
AI enables us to switch between languages, programming things that would have taken us years before.
I have normal arguments and crazy arguments against having a 401k.
First my normal arguments:
Let’s say you have 5% of your paycheck being taken out to put into your 401k.
Here’s what you could do with that money instead of accessing it while you’re old:
Even if you can’t delegate things that your employer pays you to do, you could still delegate other non-money making activities in your life, such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry. You could do that for about $1.5k per month. Alex Hormozi recently went into this concept during a talk.
You’ll make so much more investing that money into yourself than you would with the 401k at 65.
Now my crazy arguments:
I’ll be 65 in 32 years.
What has happened in the last 32 years in society?
There has been massive changes in how everything works every decade of my life.
Computers, internet, smart phones, bitcoin, AI.
Technology is advancing at a rapid rate.
We’re at a point to where energy and manufacturing in the future could be at a near 0 cost with robotics, AI, and nuclear energy.
Who knows what the next 30 years will bring.
Will we even need money by that point?
Now to get really crazy:
The dog not barking is how no politician is talking about how to pay down our country’s massive debt.
Are they planning on it defaulting?
Or are they playing the long game and waiting until money is a trivial matter?
Does your website pass the 5 second test?
If someone were to visit your website and you show it to them for only 5 seconds, could they articulate what your business is about and your main call to action?
You could use websites such as lyssna.com to perform this test.
I was working on a client’s site that I inherited and its using WooCommerce reorders.
Customers can place orders again in their account area.
The problem was that there wasn’t any indication in the admin that orders were reorders.
I wrote up some code to fix that problem, and instead of adding it to the sites already bloated functions.php, I made it a tiny plugin.
This plugin’s only job is to add a note to orders that are reorders.
Making it a plugin also makes is so that I could port this functionality to the client’s other websites easily.
Also if this functionality ever stops working for some reason, it’ll be easy to find the code responsible.
I’m going to make tiny plugins more often.
There are several reasons why I’m posting to this site, but I realized over the past weekend the most important one.
It’s so that my son could still talk to me after I die.
I could train an AI on everything I post and journal, then he can still have conversations with me after I pass.
Usernames should only be used on sites and applications where you interact with other people.
Not all websites need usernames for logins, emails are unique and work for that purpose.
It’s an extra bit of information that makes it harder for your user.
They could forget their username, making it harder for them to your your product, costing you money.
I want you to try an experiment, I promise you that you will feel off if you try this, but in a good way.
Buy a Kitchen Safe off Amazon.
Buy a smart watch if you don’t already have one (just so loved ones could get ahold of you).
Buy the Cold Turkey blocker for your computer.
Lock up your phone in the Kitchen Safe and block all distracting websites and applications on your computer for a whole day.
Give yourself nothing to do except your work.
No more cheap dopamine hits or mindless scrolling.
You will feel strange, and that’s because of the billions of dollars that tech companies spend every year for your attention.
You will feel like an addict who just had his drugs taken from him.
These companies are distracting us from reaching our potential.
The only thing that remains is the work itself.
Try this for just a day and tell me how you feel.
Keeping a clean environment helps your productivity.
Every time you walk around and see a mess, it’ll pollute your brain space.
This is true in digital form too.
To help combat this I have a .bat file that runs everytime I start up my computer.
One of the things it does is that it deletes a folder I have on my desktop and remakes it.
It’s called “temp”.
Throughout my day as a web developer/designer, clients send me assets to add to their sites.
Instead of keeping everything in one huge downloads folder, I save those assets to “temp”, and upload them to the site.
Then I don’t have to think about removing those files I’ll never use again from my computer, they’ll just be gone next time I boot up.
Yesterday I talked about the mass video transcriber I created.
I created it so that I could query AI on any sort of course I go through.
I download all the videos, transcribe them, put them all in one txt file, then I can talk to Claude Opus about it.
Claude can give me checklists, answer any of my questions, tell me what to do in specific scenarios, and it’s like the course creator is personally coaching me.
I wrote a mass video transcriber using python.
You can add a bunch of videos to the specified folder and run this script to create a transcription for every one using Google’s Cloud APIs.
Here’s a link to it: https://github.com/richiekastl/mass-video-transcriber
This is the easiest time in history to be successful.
With the intersection of AI, social media, and being able to learn anything you want on YouTube, it’s never been easier to start your own business.
We also have never had this many distractions at any point in history.
All you have to do to be successful in today’s world is learn how to not get distracted by your phone and leverage social media instead of it leveraging you.
Most of your competition isn’t doing this, they’re glued to their addictions and would rather be cattle than farmers.
You’ll be the weird one in your social circle, but they’ll get over it.
Prioritize your health, especially if you’re working from home.
Working from home is an excellent way to get heart disease.
Sitting on your computer all day, inside, away from the sun.
It’s a recipe for disaster if you aren’t careful.
I use a treadmill desk whenever I have work to do that I can do on just two screens, and it is relatively creative (such as writing this very blog post).
I also use a timer at my desk to make sure I don’t sit more than 2 hours at a time.
Getting sunlight is also important, not only for your Circadian Rhythm, but also for your heart health.
Being in the sun helps prevent heart disease, aside from Vitamin D.
Also, lifting will help prevent heart disease and help fight off the other 3 horsemen of death, but it is pretty hard to make it out the gym and gym equipment takes up a lot of space.
I use the X3 system to build muscle.
It takes up very little space and I get a great workout whenever I can fit it in.
Should you invest in SEO or use paid ads to drive traffic to your website?
Use both.
SEO will get you results overtime while paid ads will give you results quicker.
The goal is that SEO will eventually make it so that you don’t have to pay for ads anymore, you just get traffic organically.
I’ve been going through the Mike Mandel Hypnosis Academy and I would like to teach you something about hypnosis that could help you get more sales on your website.
In hypnosis there is a principal called “heteroaction”.
It means that if you can get someone to do something small, then they’re more likely to do something else, even if it’s unrelated.
Hypnotists use this by asking you to focus on something, lift a finger, etc.
You could use this on your website by asking your customer to do something small.
Whether it be to give something a like, sign up for your email list, leave a comment, etc.
If you can get your customer to do something small, then they’re more likely to purchase from you.
What goes into the perfect website?
The perfect website is different for every business, but each website needs to share these core 3 technical rules.
Having a WordPress site that is unoptimized only gives you 2 out of the 3 rules.
Squarespace and Wix only give you 2 out of the 3 rules.
Shopify only gives you 2 out of the 3 rules.
The stack I recommend to hit all 3 rules is Astro + Contentful or WordPress API.
“I have a Facebook page, why do I need a website?”
I’ve heard that above quote quite a few times throughout my career.
A website is your business’s home on the internet.
It is something that you own that is really hard to take away from you (unless you’re on Squarespace, Wix, or a similar service).
Facebook can shut down your page and then all the work you put into it will vanish.
Your website can help your customers find you on Google and locally.
Your website can set you apart from your competitors.
It can answer your customer’s questions and they can buy your services or products through it.
Brett at designjoy.com has built a brilliant business model.
Instead of quoting work out, sending proposals, etc, he just has clients sign up with a subscription model.
They can pause it at anytime they don’t need design work.
All he needs is a few clients to sign up, then he’s profitable.
I’ve been following Astro for a while now.
Why would you pick Astro over other web frameworks?
Well let me take a step back.
Most of my client’s websites are on WordPress.
WordPress makes it really easy for clients to update their websites and add more content.
The issue is that, in order to make it fast, you have to rely on services like Nitropack or WP Rocket.
You can thank WordPress’s plugin architecture for that.
The plugins load many external resources, you have little control over it.
That’s why services like Nitropack exist.
Not only do the plugins make your site slower, but you have to keep them updated or else it’s a security vulnerability.
What I like about Astro is that it is fast by default and it compiles down to a static html, so it’s great for SEO.
Astro also has built-in page transitions, making it easy to make your website seamlessly load pages.
Then with Astro, you could use a service like Contentful to make it easy for the client to update their website.
Astro is worth checking out.
Boring things suck.
Doing taxes.
Writing blog posts.
Researching.
Programming.
Learning.
Your next task.
It’s really hard to do all of those things, especially when you’re working at home by yourself.
Nobody wants to do the things I listed, they would rather chase trance-inducing dopamine buttons.
Being able to be bored is a superpower these days.
Almost nothing in the digital economy gives you an instant dopamine response.
Work feels unrewarding on a short time horizon.
But the boring things is where the gold is buried.
Do the boring things.
Normalize being bored.
Only then you will win.
My son was born on March 18 at 6am.
There are no words for how much joy that sentence brings me.
Mommy and I love you very much son and we can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives raising you.
You are very loved and you have a great support group.
I have a treadmill desk and it makes it so easy to hit 10k steps a day.
My setup is that I have 3 monitors for my “sitdown” desk, and whenever I want to switch over to the treadmill, I just hit a couple of buttons and then my display from my computer shoots over to 2 monitors on a standing desk that has a treadmill under it.
I highly suggest a setup like this if you are a desk worker.
It could save your life.
The one thing we can all learn from the Hannah Barron situation is to lean into your own strengths.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the original tweet.
This accent needs to be illegal and women should be banned from doing manual labour like this.
— Samirah (@SameeraKhan) March 9, 2024
There is NOTHING feminine about American women.
American women are literally men. pic.twitter.com/iypi1CGNov
This blew up to 60 million views as of the time of this post.
Then this is her response:
This young lady just BODIED everyone that was giving her grief. And she did it by being bout the sweetest young thing you ever did see. Kudos young lady. pic.twitter.com/PAaOb2ihmo
— Phil Labonte, Talent Terrorist (@philthatremains) March 11, 2024
Her response video to the bullies calling her out was A+.
”Build your own box and don’t try to fit in anybody else’s” - Hannah Barron
What box are you trying to fit in? How can you fit into your own box?
I’m going through Wes Mcdowell’s Profitable Website Launchpad course and I highly recommend it.
Yesterday, I wrote up content for a new website I’m launching soon.
It’s the best content I’ve ever written.
Below are the notes I took from that course summarized by Claude AI.
Yesterday I updated this website to show the entire post on the homepage and on the all posts page, ala Seth Godin’s site.
It took me way to long to figure out.
The posts astro component used a Card component to show the posts and I couldn’t figure out how to pass the post content into it.
In Astro, the blog uses content collections.
In order to grab the content of a post, you must use a promise that returns an Astro component, at least that’s how I understand it.
I don’t believe you can pass an entire Astro component into a TSX component, which Card was.
So I ended up stripping out the card component and transferring the markup to the posts Astro component itself.
If you’re interested in that, you can see the commit here: https://github.com/richiekastl/richiekastl.com/commit/d05bb9c31af4d8b6cb43249ffb6c4b448d432fed
I also changed Twitter to X, because you know, that’s a thing.
Scott Adams coined the term “systems over goals”.
Having a system of good habits leads to better results than just setting big goals because systems make you do the right things every day without needing lots of willpower.
If you’re trying to lose weight, have a diet system that you follow instead of having a lofty goal.
Every day you don’t reach your goal, you will feel like a failure.
Expanding on my post from yesterday, I wanted to talk more about how to be productive while at home, specifically how to prevent distractions.
Home is where you relax and unwind, but since the pandemic, working at home has become normalized.
How can you work while nobody is watching you?
A couple tools I use are Cold Turkey and the Kitchen Safe.
I can setup blocks of time on my calendar that I want to work, and Cold Turkey will prevent me from opening any social media or video games on my PC.
The Kitchen Safe prevents me from scrolling on my phone.
But how could people reach me if they need me you might be wondering.
I have an Apple Watch.
If there’s an emergency (and there have been since I started using this system), I smash my Kitchen Safe box, grab my phone, and head out.
You might also be thinking why don’t you use your willpower?
Why do you need these tools to work?
Are you a bitch or something?
Well let me paint you a picture.
How many people do you know who are addicted to video games? To social media? To “other things” you can find on the internet?
I’d be willing to bet that most people in your life are addicted to one of these things.
There are billions of dollars that go into these industries every year to optimize how to capture your attention.
They don’t care that you have your own dreams and work you want to pursue.
All they care about is that you get to the next level on Candy Crush.
You are cattle to them.
They just want you to suck down the slop they feed you.
Fatten you up, consume their products, then instead of getting slaughtered you get diabetes, cancer, heart disease, or a neurodegenerative disease such as alzheimer’s or dementia (Dr. Peter Attia’s four horsemen of death).
Then you become the cattle of a different industry, big pharma, that will gladly help you treat the deadly disease that you’ve contracted.
How can video games or social media cause one of the four horsemen diseases?
Well because you were distracted, you didn’t go to the gym.
Because you were distracted, you sat inside all day and didn’t get any sunlight.
Because you were distracted, you didn’t meal prep and you ordered fast food.
Because you were distracted, you didn’t get as much work done as you needed to, so you get drunk again that night to help numb the pain.
Because you were distracted, your much more stressed at work, wondering if they will fire you any day now, so you start smoking again.
Because you were distracted, you didn’t work towards your dream, and this is just another day lost that you will never back.
Because you were distracted, you will die unfulfilled, just cattle.
I have a problem of staying in bed for too long, mindlessly scrolling on my phone.
In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, he says in order to break a bad habit, you need to put as much friction between you and the bad habit as possible.
Meaning just make your habit really hard to do.
There’s a device called a kitchen safe.
It’s a safe with a timer originally made to help smokers quit smoking and to lock up your sweets.
I put my phone in it before I go to bed, and set it to unlock 12 hours later.
Now I wake up and I have nothing to do except go to my computer.
Problem solved, for now.
I have a productivity stack that I haven’t seen anyone else use.
I use Clickup.com to manage everything that I have to do that day.
I have several recurring tasks, such as checking the position of a certain set of keywords and for working out.
I always know what I need to do that day.
That’s not the entire battle though.
The entire battle is that I’m only accountable to myself, I don’t really have a boss (unless you count my clients as “bosses”).
To really maximize my time, I have a stack of products I use to get my day to day work done.
First is focus blocks.
Whenever you log into focus blocks, you get placed on a call with many other people from across the world who also want to focus on the job that they’re doing.
Then I also use Cold Turkey.
Cold Turkey shuts down any sort of video game, social media, or news site on my computer for the time I specify and it is very hard to shut it down.
The last thing I use to inject productivity into my veins is focus@will.
Focus@will uses binaural beats that hack your brain into a productivity mode.
I don’t want to pretend I understand all the science behind it but it works for me.
This is my productivity stack simplified:
Focus.
I was on a mastermind call yesterday talking about how I’m in limbo right now.
I don’t want any new projects to start because my son can be born any day now and I have no idea what life is going to be like with him.
I was thinking about starting a newsletter, tweeting more, posting on YouTube etc.
My mastermind said don’t do any of that, and instead focus on one channel, which for me is cold email and cold calling.
I would really like to have a thriving personal brand, but the business growth for me right now is in cold email and cold calling.
This reminds me of the graph from the Book Essentialism.
If I have my attention divided across several things such as a newsletter, keeping up on Twitter, and posting on YouTube, then my cold outreach efforts will suffer.
If I just focus on cold outreach, I’ll be able to make it work.
I hate annoying people with cold outreach, but it can help me help people.
If I cold call a business, build them an amazing site that converts great, then I have helped them.
They can now buy braces for their kids, buy their dream car, or simply stay in business.
For the 100 people I annoyed by cold outreach, the 1 I help will make it worth it.
I recently went through the Rapid Learner course and I recommend it.
In the course, they recommend to use a spaced repetition system to really internalize what you’re learning.
Spaced repetition systems are essentially flash cards but you grade yourself as you do them.
Cards that you fail will show up again more frequently until you get better at them.
The one that I’ve been using is called AnkiApp.
How does AI play into this?
Well you can take any course or book that you’re learning from and turn it Anki flashcards really easy.
Take the transcript of a course video, feed it into your favorite AI and ask it to give you that information back but in question and answer format.
Then ask it to give you a CSV that has the first column as the question and the second column as the answer.
Then you can import that into Anki and bingo bango, you have a deck from the course you can study.
How could you accomplish a big goal that you have? The thing that seems impossible right now.
I’ve accomplished quite a few huge goals in my life, such as running 6 marathons, singing to my wife at my wedding in front of all of our family and friends, and starting my own web design agency.
The “secret” consists of 3 ingredients: commitment, dedicated time, and accountability.
One of the many things I’ve learned from Scott Adams is that there’s a difference between wanting and deciding. Sure you want your big goal, but have you decided to actually commit and do it?
For singing to my wife, I committed to it because it was a huge thing I could do for her to show her how much I loved her. I also imagined what my 80 year old self would think if I had chickened out of doing it. I blocked out at least a half hour everyday to practice singing. I would either practice notes, run through the song I picked, or meet with one of my teachers who held me accountable.
For marathon training I set up a training plan, I put it on my calendar, and if I have to run that day I run. I’m committed to it because I want to keep my yearly streak going as long as I can. I have the medals on my office wall that hold me accountable, I don’t ever want to see a year gap between them.
For starting my own web design company, while I was working a job I consumed many, many business books and watched YouTube videos of people who did the same. I also took action and I was working freelance on the side while also working my full-time job. I was committed because I am radicalized against the idea of working for someone else my whole life and relying on them not firing me in order to feed my family. Every morning when I had a full-time job, I would wake up and visualize what it would be like working for myself, and that’s what kept me accountable to actually doing it.
Accountability isn’t always another person holding your feet to the fire to make sure you’re going to do the thing you said you wanted to do. Accountability could also come in another form such as avoiding the shame you would feel if you didn’t get it done.
What do you want to accomplish?
Do you want to become a dentist? Google “how to become a dentist”, find out what you need to do, then dedicate time to it everyday. Literally put a block on your calendar and make it a habit that at that time, everyday, you make progress towards becoming a dentist. Eventually you’ll get there.
I’m back to blogging here one again. I slapped a new coat of paint on my blog and I upgraded from Hugo to Astro. The last time I said I was back was in 2022, also in Feb. I lasted about 8 blog posts before I just stopped posting. This is something that I really want to stick with.
I look up to Seth Godin because he blogs everyday and it’s usually brilliant. I would like to be more like him.
Blogging everyday doesn’t really have much of an impact on your fiances, at least I don’t think personal blogging like this does, and that’s not the end goal.
It’s mostly so I could generate ideas on what to write about, then I can translate that to a newsletter and to my X, Threads, and YouTube accounts.
Or I’ll just talk about things that are completely unrelated to that.
My wife is due with our son soon and I can’t wait to meet him. I would really like this to be a resource that he can look back on one day to experience the journey his old man went through.
YouTube is a long game, and I’m in it for at least the next 5 years.
I’ve only been in for about 2 months now and I have about 13 subscribers.
It is pretty discouraging but I’m going to keep putting out new videos every week and stay consistent with it.
It isn’t about the amount of subscribers I have but whether or not I stay consistent with it..
Every year I decide on a word that will be my north star for the year.
Back in 2018, it was fearless and I took a 6 week vacation from my job to go backpacking trip across Europe.
In 2019, it was growth and I bought my first duplex that year.
In 2020, it was resist and I used that to counter bad habits.
In 2021 that word was consistency and I established routines.
This year, 2022, that word is accumulation. I’m going to accumulate views and subscribers on YouTube, I’m going to accumulate more blog posts, I’m going to accumulate more fans and more work for my contracting business.
Whats your word for this year?
I have a situation where I could expend energy and stress to chase down a small amount of money and protect my ego, but I also have opportunities to make more than that amount of money.
Chasing down the small amount of money might involve court, and other things and it just isn’t worth it compared to how much I could make doing other things.
It sucks, I feel like I’m getting taken advantage of, but time is the most precious thing that we have.
We can always make more money, but we can’t make more time.
Concentrate on the things that could change your life if they work out, not on the things that drain your energy but protect your ego.
Let your ego die.
This week, I’m going to post a video on whether or not Frontend Web Developers should know SEO.
I think that it really depends on what you’re going after.
If you want to work at an agency, then by all means learn SEO at the deepest levels that you can.
At an agency, being a swiss army knife is better than being great at one thing.
That was the case at the agencies I worked at anyway.
Knowing SEO will help you develop your websites with the end in mind.
A website doesn’t just sit there and generate profit for you, you need to constantly add fuel to it in the form of website updates such as blog posts.
Being able to execute technical SEO on a website out of the box will be invaluable for the clients.
If you know both SEO and Frontend Development, you will stand out from the crowd when applying for a job at an agency.
Resources to learn SEO would be, Digital Marketer’s SEO Certification course(paid), learningseo.io(free), and Moz’s SEO Learning Center(free).
If you want to end up at a company such as Facebook or Twitter, then there really isn’t a need to learn SEO, there you will need to know Frontend Web Development quickly.
To see this video when it drops, subscribe to my channel.
My editor opens up whenever my computer opens, but sometimes I feel too overwhelmed to blog. The failure part of the title was clickbait, I am still blogging more than I would have, even if this is my worst blog post to date.
So far this Tiny Habits idea of just having my editor open as soon as I turn on my computer has been successful. I completely forgot that I was supposed to write a blog post this morning and then boop, my editor comes up. I recommend you find how a Tiny Habit could help you out.
I’ve already fallen out of the habit of blogging everyday.
Last summer, I read a book called Tiny Habits. I’ll give you the 80% of the useful lessons in the book here.
In the book, the author suggests the following to form a new habit:
I used the framework above to get into the habit of flossing my teeth, I’ve never flossed my teeth so consistently in my life.
I’m going to use the same framework for blogging everyday. This is my plan:
There might be some future blog posts that are only a sentence long, and this is why.
I’m currently listening to Cal Newport on the Tim Ferriss Podcast and one takeaway I got was how to plan out your big goals. We also use this framework in a group I’m in called Quantum Leap.
You define what your big goals are for the year. Then you break that goal down into smaller goals for each quarter, then you take those goals and break them down for each month, then you take those and break them down for each week, then you take those and break them down for each day.
This way you could plan out every single day to reach your big goals.
I believe that getting up early is the best thing you could do for yourself. Every morning that I get up at 4 or 5am, I have a super productive day. Days that I sleep in, the opposite happens. Finding the balance between having enough sleep and getting up early is difficult.
The idea of getting up really early in the morning came to me from Jocko Willink who gets up every day at 4:30am but has admitted that he doesn’t get enough sleep. After reading Matthew Walker’s book called Why We Sleep, I’ve been making sure I get my 8 hours every night. Sleeo is super important, it affects every system in your body.
Finding the balance between getting up early and still getting the sleep I need is very hard.
I’m back to blogging here. I would like to make it a habit to create a mini blog posts every morning and just work on this blog for 10 minutes. This is more of a personal blog and I don’t intend to make a business out of it, it’s really only for my own purposes but if you’re reading this then thank you.
I’ve recently started a YouTube channel where I talk about how to get a job as a Frontend Developer. I’m going to use this blog to rift on ideas for the channel and to outline scripts. I’ll also still be blogging about goal achievement frameworks and life as well.
Today I’m going to be posting a video on whether or not you need a degree to get a job in development.
I don’t think that you do, but it really depends on what your end goal is and how hard you’re willing to work.
If you’re trying to get a job at a fortune 500 company that has a HR department, it’s going to be difficult to get a job there without a degree, but it’s possible.
If you have a big body of work and it’s obvious that you know what you’re doing, you could probably get a job there. Having a portfolio of work, a blog, and a YouTube channel will help you get in the door, and then if you really knock it out of the park in the interview then there’s no reason you won’t get the job.
If you want to get a job at a startup or build your own company, then no degree is required.
It is June 16th and I still have yet to accomplish most of my quarterly goals. Every quarter I set new goals for myself. I started doing this after I read the 12 week year, which is a book I highly recommend. If you’ve found yourself in this position before, I’ll teach you how to mitigate the damage. In this post, I’ll teach you how to break down your goals into how many hours they’ll take, determine how much free time you can spend on them, and which goals should take priority.
These are the goals I set out to accomplish this quarter.
I’ve only accomplished one of these goals. What’s my problem? Did I set my goals too high?
Let’s break down these goals by how much time they would take:
8 hours of watching the course and 5 hours of interviews. His book is only 49 pages long so it should only take about a hour to read. His course is about 8 hours but I like to apply what I learn as soon as I learn it so it’ll probably take me about 16 hours to finish it.
Hours: 16
This is the only one I’ve done so far. I just learned that this year’s race is virtual so that’s going to be much harder. I love marathons because it’s like a party that lasts for 6 hours. People are very nice and along the course, they’re outside of their houses handing you free drinks, sometimes alcoholic.
Currently, I’m at 185 pounds and I set this goal while I was at 190. I’ve lost a little bit of weight but not enough to complete this. I’ll be a little easy on myself and say that if I alternate day fast the rest of the month then I completed this.
His course has was pretty great. I spent a whole afternoon coming up with 50 blog posts that I could write about Advanced Custom Fields. His course is also why I chose Advanced Custom Fields to write about. I still have yet to produce a post about it but trust me, they’re coming. I’ll be writing a review of his blogging course soon.
I purchased this a long time ago but I haven’t gone through it yet. I’d say this is going to take about 10-15 hours to go through.
Hours: 15
This blog post will be the 4th one this quarter. I have 9 more to go so you’ll be seeing a lot from me this month. Once I’ve accomplished this goal I’m going to consistently write twice a week. I estimate it’ll take about 10 hours to complete this.
Hours: 10
I need to learn more about Gatsby to do this, but this is the reason why I chose Gatsby as my platform, so I could learn more about it and React. I’d estimate this will take me about 5 hours to learn how to do it and implement it.
Hours: 5
I have a sequence in mind that I would like to create for new subscribers. It’s going to be a 3 email sequence that you receive as soon as you sign up. I estimate this will take about 4 hours.
Hours: 4
This is probably going to have to get moved to next quarter. Last year I bought a duplex and my girlfriend and I redid the top cabinets in my kitchen. We did those before we redid the floors and moved it. It took us longer than expected and we needed to move in so our cabinets have been “two-toned” for the past year now. We’re going to keep them two-toned and paint the bottom cabinets an espresso color. I estimate it’ll take us about 20-25 hours to complete this.
Hours: 25
I decided on these books this quarter because I have plans to make this blog a full-time business in the future and I want to be best prepared for it. 22 Laws of Marketing, Small Giants, and the Effective Executive are all books that Tim Ferriss recommended in a Youtube video that you can watch here.
Content Inc and Bird by Bird are books about blogging and writing. Then Refactoring is a book that will help me in my programming day job.
I’d estimate that it’ll take me about 30 hours to read all of these books.
Hours: 30
My girlfriend and I sort of fell out of working out together when COVID hit. This could be another goal I can move to next quarter.
If I stick to a schedule of working 2 hours every weekday morning on my goals then I have about 20 hours left his quarter, way below the goal I set for myself.
I have off today so I have about 4 more hours I can dedicate towards my goals, so we’re at 24.
I adjusted my weekday calendar so I could have time for my personal goals in the evening as well, it looks like I can have about an hour. The rest of my free time is dedicated to my girlfriend and to running. My calendar ensures that I have time to spend with my friends on Saturdays and to recover on Sunday. It also ensures that I work 40 hours a week and I get 8 hours of sleep each night.
If I stick to this schedule then I can have about 15 and a half more hours, putting my total at 39.
As for my weekends, I have 2 birthday parties for my friends on Saturdays and I don’t expect I’ll be able to do much on Sundays this month. I’m going to put a tentative 2 hours on my calendars on Sundays, so now I’m at 43 hours.
Which goals will get me the farthest towards my overall goals? I’d say these:
The total hours for these goals are 46 hours, about 3 hours over. Hopefully, some of these take less time than I think they’ll take.
Here’s a screenshot of my calendar:
Thank you very much for making it to the end of this blog post. I hope that I didn’t bore you to death by talking about my personal goals and that this post has taught you how to break down your goals, determine how much free time you have, and how to prioritize your goals if you set the bar a little too high.
Since I started this blog I have been writing mostly just about what’s on my mind and ways I could improve myself and my productivity but I wasn’t writing with a certain niche in mind, which is not great for SEO and marketing my blog. I’ll still write what’s on my mind because this is richiekastl.com and my website, but I’m going to start mostly writing about a little Wordpress plugin known as Advanced Custom Fields or ACF for short.
I subscribe to many of the things that come out of Tim Ferriss’s mouth, and his criteria for choosing to pursue a project is two-fold. First off he is choosing projects that are based on the relations and skills they will help him develop so that even if the project fails, he succeeds in developing relationships and skills that can transcend the project. The second criteria are that he has to feel very visceral excitement about the project.
I believe I check both of those boxes when it comes to choosing ACF for this blog. Even if I fail in creating a successful business out of this blog, the skills I learn from taking this deep dive will help my career and I am excited about it. By learning more about what ACF can do and advanced techniques, I’ll be able to develop faster using it and I’ll be able to create better websites. There are also other things that I’m interested in using ACF for such as building static Wordpress sites and I’d like to learn more about how to use ACF with Gutenberg.
I’ve been following John Sonmez’s How to Build a Blog Course while creating this website and one of the exercises was to come up with 50 different blog post ideas for the niche that you decide upon. I did that last night and there are quite a few exciting blog posts that I can’t wait to start writing. These are a few of my favorites.
Once I have quite a few posts about ACF under my belt on this blog, I’m going to create a giant post that’s an all in one resource about getting started with ACF, why you should use ACF, ACF best practices, and so on.
To my astute developer readers, you may be wondering why this blog is built with Gatsby and not Wordpress. That’s a reasonable question and I did it because Gatsby is much more performant than Wordpress. Since Gatsby compiles down to HTML files my site loads much faster, I don’t have to worry about security, and I can host my website for free on Netlify.
Once I learn how to create static Wordpress sites then I’ll rebuild this site using that and create a post documenting the process.
I’ve been wandering aimlessly with this blog for about 2 months now and I’m excited that I finally honed in on a niche that I’m interested in. Even if I fail and nobody reads this blog, I’ll learn a lot more about ACF, I can establish myself as an expert on ACF, I’ll create a great writing habit, and I’ll have more technical writing experience. If I don’t gain traction on this blog after a year of writing about ACF I’ll pivot to something else.
Thank you for reading.
In March I set a simple goal for myself to write 13 500 word blog posts for this site during this quarter.
So far I’ve written two including this one.
I originally planned on writing one blog post a week but that hasn’t happened. Why? And what am I going to do differently to achieve this goal and what could you take away from this blog post?
Let’s take a step back and examine how I got here. Currently I’m writing this blog post at 5am, way before I start working my day job. I’m usually not up at this hour but on this particular day I find myself awake. I couldn’t sleep last night due to many reasons so instead of just laying awake in bed I decided to get up and work on my personal goals. Today is an important day at work because we’re launching a site that has caused trouble for us and I’m concerned about how smooth the launch is going to go. I guess I’m writing this post as a theraputic way of dealing with my stress about that project, as a way to control something in my life and also make progress. Happiness is progress. I’ll save more about that philosophy that in a later blog post.
I would like to get into the habit of doing this every day, I don’t have to get up at 5am but I don’t want to be rolling out of bed at 8:30-9am like I have been. I’ve been working 12-14 hour days for my day job and it has wrecked my sleep schedule and my calendar that I talked about in my last post. So what am I going to do about it? I’m going to set rules for myself, feel free to adapt them or add to them. I’d love to hear about them if you do set rules for yourself like I am, reach out to me on Twitter @richiekastl.
These rules are simple enough for me to follow and will lead to future success of this blog. I could also follow these rules if I have to put in 12-14 hour days.
I would like it if I didn’t have to work that many hours, but the reality of the situation right now is that I have to if I want to keep our clients happy and make sure projects are done in the time that we said they would be. I don’t have a leader title at my company but I still take 100% responsibility of every project that I’m on. I treat every single one of them like I own the company. Eventually there will come a point to where I could start working normal hours again once we get through this hump.
I think that it is good to stare at your problems in its cold dead face. If you accept your problems for what they are you can start to address them. I could have taken a different path and decided to just let this blog die and blamed the fact that I’m working extraordinary hours on its demise, taking the responsibility off of my shoulders. It’s something that’s out of my control so it would be completely understandable to a reasonable person. But I decided to take 100% responsibility and find a way to keep it going and achieve my goal.
I hope that this has helped you in some way to help achieve something you’re trying to accomplish. Thank you for reading.
I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent— no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you” - Seneca
This is a time in history that we will be telling our grandchildren about. It is a time that we get to test ourselves and we get to grow. I know there are a lot of negative things happening because of this pandemic but you can make a lot of positive things happen for yourself during this time.
I live in Ohio and today is day 12 of a state-wide lockdown. My company has been working fully remote for about 4 weeks now. I’ve worked from home before but only on a one to two days per week basis. It’s been a roller coaster of emotions and I’ve felt my self slipping into an undisciplined routine. I realize that we’re living in unprecedented times but I would like to come out of this quarantine having kicked a lot of ass instead of sitting around in fear. I feel out of a productive routine so this blog post is about what I’m doing to fix it. I hope it helps you too.
This is going to be my routine moving forward:
Your day can be anything you decide it is, so the night before I’m going to plan that my next day is going to be productive. I’ll analyze my Trello board before I go to bed so I know what I have to do in the morning. Then before I go to bed I’ll lock my phone in my Kitchen Safe for 18 hours so that it unlocks around 2-3 pm the next day. There are a lot of reasons why I do this that I’ll get into further in a future blog post. I highly recommend doing it though, it has changed my life. Phones are designed to be human attention machines.
Sleep is always important but even more so now because your immune system is weaker without sleep. After reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep I take sleep very seriously. In that book he dives into studies as to why sleep isn’t just good for your mental health, it’s good for every function in your body.
I know I sound like your dentist right now but there’s an important reason I included this that has nothing to do with your dental health. How you do one thing is how you do everything is a very popular saying that I’ve found to be true, so I put a lot of work into brushing my teeth. I have a little sand timer that I use to make sure I brush for at least 2 minutes, then I floss my teeth with a flossing stick, then I use mouth wash to clean all of the parts that I missed. I feel great after I put that much work into something as simple as brushing my teeth and then I want to continue that streak into everything else that I do that day…and it’s great for my dental health.
One of my goals last quarter was to start taking a supplement because I wasn’t taking anything before and after a lot of research I decided on Athletic Greens. This supplement also boosts the immune system because it packs Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Zinc, and Selinum into a one scoop serving. I also take their Vitamin D + Vitamin K supplement to further boost my immune system.
I’ve been using Trello for the past 5 years now and I don’t know how to function without it at this point. I’ll write a blog post in the future that goes more in-depth into this but for now know that my Trello board consists of 9 lists, a complete list, a future to-do list, and a list for every day of the week. Every Monday morning I assign myself tasks on each day of the week, I try not to schedule more than 1 hour a day since these tasks are mostly for personal objectives. I got this productivity system from John Sonmez and it has done wonders for me. He uses Kanban Flow instead of Trello but you can do the same thing in Trello. You can watch his video here.
The first thing I do in the morning is that I work on my personal goals (such as writing for this blog) before I start working. I can trade the time I used to use to commute for time to get me closer to my goals. I find that I’m the most productive first thing in the morning which is perfect for an activity like writing.
After reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I schedule everything on my Google Calendar and I live and die by it. I don’t schedule minute things on there like brushing my teeth, instead, I time block everything so something like brushing my teeth would fall into my morning routine time block. I already have my personal calendar ingrained in my brain but my work calendar varies because of meetings and that’s how I schedule my tasks, so I do a quick check on it before I start my workday.
I approach my professional work like I approach my personal work. Every Monday I schedule out every task I’m supposed to get done that week on my Google Calendar. I create events for every single task that I’m going to do that week. This accomplishes two things, it gives me a map of exactly what I’m supposed to do every day and it discourages people from inviting me to meetings. Whenever someone wants to invite me to a meeting they usually ask first now since they see my calendar is so full.
After I’m done with my job for the day I disconnect and try not to work further into the night. It is very tempting to keep working after normal work hours when working from home and if you work on long-term projects like I do but I’ve burnt myself out multiple times in my life and it is very difficult to get yourself back into the groove after you work too hard. I’d rather consistently get great work done every day than work 10-12 hours a day and burn myself out. This is also yet another thing I’ve learned from Deep Work, so I highly suggest checking that book out.
I hope this post helped you out. Stay safe out there.
In the past, I’ve been notorious for declaring that I’ll do a side hustle and never actually following through with it.
Examples include:
I failed at all of these projects because they aren’t around today. If I had followed through with my word that I was going to finish these then my life would be very different today and I don’t want you, dear reader, to be in the same spot.
Let’s examine the 4 deadly traps that killed my digital card game.
When I would work on this I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I just knew that I wanted to create a card game. I didn’t define what success would look like or when I would be “done” with it. When I would work on it I would get overwhelmed with all of the stuff I still had to do and I’d give up and go play League of Legends.
I never defined a scope for the project so I wasn’t sure how I should go about creating it. I would spend hours on writing the game in Javascript, then go into Photoshop to concept a character, then I’d go into Evernote to create cards, I was all over the place. I would work on different parts of the game every time I’d sit down to work on it so nothing was getting done, I was just chasing different rabbits. If I were to start this again, a really simple overview of the phases would probably go something like this:
If I had a road map like this then I would have known what to work on at the given time. When I was writing the game in Javascript I didn’t even know what the game was yet! I was just slinging code to make something work.
I didn’t take the game as seriously as I would a project at work. Since this project was something that I created on my own I figured that I didn’t have to do it and I only worked on it when it was fun for me. When it wasn’t fun for me I would play League of Legends instead.
When I started working on my game I had very little experience in the skills I needed to make the game come to life. I was still in college for web development at the time I was making the game. I had very little experience in game design, digital art, sound design, and programming. When I would work on the game it would be very difficult for me since I had no experience making games. If I were to tackle this project again I would dedicate time to learning these skills as they relate to the simple phases I defined above. I would read books and go through tutorials for the phase I was in while I was actively working on the project. I would read a book on game design and then apply what I learn there to the concept of the game. I would avoid JUST reading the book on game design. If you learn something but don’t apply it then you’ll lose the knowledge you gained rather quickly.
I’ve gone through countless tutorials on stuff that I’ve never actually applied. For example, I’ve gone through about 3 courses on how to use React but I haven’t applied anything that I learned in them. I know I’m using Gatsby for this blog but I’m honestly just using it because it’s the most in-demand static site generator at the moment and not because it’s React. It being in React is a plus for me though since I can work with React on an actual project so I can learn it better.
I fell into these deadly traps over and over again and they killed my side hustles. With this blog, I hope to break the cycle. Here’s how I’m tackling the three traps above.
When Tim Ferriss started his podcast he did it as an experiment. He decided to only dedicate his time to doing six podcast episodes and then after that, he would decide if he would continue doing it or not. With this blog I’m going to something similar, if I hate doing it and I believe it isn’t going anywhere, I’m going to stop writing for this blog after three months of writing one blog post per week. If I really enjoy doing it I might write more but I do want to stick to a consistent schedule.
After reading the 12-week year I now define my goals at the beginning of every quarter. My goal for this quarter was to just get this blog started. I defined my goal for this quarter like this:
Next quarter my goal is to write one blog post a week (13 posts in total) that is at least 500 words. I’m keeping it simple so that I don’t get overwhelmed and I start making forward progress with this blog. I also learned about consistency over intensity recently. I would rather have a blog that has a decent amount of content on it then no blog at all. If I were to set my goal to have 100 10,000 word blog posts by the end of the year I would get overwhelmed and go play video games instead.
My blog is mostly going to be about what I’ve learned the past decade and what tools past Richie could have used to achieve his goals. I hope that it helps you as well dear reader.
The overall goal for this project would be to help as many web developers as I can to increase their productivity and help them achieve their goals while being 100% transparent with them. The side-effect would be that I have an audience that trusts me that I could tap into to create a side-income for myself (through courses and affiliate sales) and it will set myself up as an expert who could get hired to speak at conferences. I will sell stuff to my audience but only stuff that I believe in 100%, I’ll never peddle bullshit to them.
The phases for this side hustle are:
You might be thinking that phases 2 and 3 should be flipped and you would probably be right. My goal right now is to get into the habit of creating posts for you guys and to see where I land with the niche for this site. Right now I’m thinking that I’m mostly going to be writing about productivity for developers but that might change in the future. Once I figure out the sweet spot of what I like to write about and what resonates with my audience, I’ll build a brand around that.
I’m viewing creating this blog as life or death. I have this blog post out here saying that I’m going to create at least 13 blog posts so I’m going to do it come hell or high water. I’m going to dedicate at least 30 minutes a day to this blog, probably in the morning. It will be in my calendar and I treat my calendar like a north star, I will follow it.
I’m also treating this blog as a business and creating a business for yourself really is life or death. If you’re working at a job and you solely rely on them for your income, then you’re exposing yourself to catastrophe. If you’re not producing more income for your employer than they’re paying you, then you’re putting them in a tough spot. I’m not saying that all employers will immediately fire you (they are human after all), but you never want to be in a spot where you only have one source of income because it can disappear. Not only could you get fired but the business could go under, they could experience hardship and have to lay people off, or there could be a black swan event that takes out the industry that the business you work for is in.
I don’t have any experience creating a blog or even writing outside of the assignments I had to do in high school and college. I have bookmarked articles and I have many books on how to create a blog but I haven’t read most of them. Instead, the approach I’m going to take is to learn one day and then write the next. My schedule is going to be something like this with the 30 minutes I’ve allotted myself every weekday:
The only materials I’ll permit myself to learn from are materials that I can apply immediately to my blog.
And that’s how I’m going to make this side hustle a success despite my long list of failed side hustles in the past. If you like this material and you feel that it helped you please share it with someone who you think would benefit from it and also subscribe to the email list. I’ll send out an email every week when I release a new blog post and I’ll also have links to other resources that I enjoyed and I hope you’ll enjoy them too.