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:

1. Identify a habit that you already have that will make sense to incorporate your new habit with, for example, flossing after brushing your teeth.
2. Do the smallest thing possible with your new habit, for the flossing example, floss only one tooth and then throw out the floss.
3. Do this for about 2 weeks and if you want to floss all of your teeth go ahead, but at least try to get one tooth flossed.
4. Overtime this will build the 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:

1. Have VS Code startup when I turn on my computer.
2. Create a new post and write at least one sentence.
3. Publish it

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.

• Finish Ryan Robinson’s blogging course and book
• Begin Akron Marathon training
• Alternate day fasting until I’m 160 pounds
• Complete John Sonmez’s blogging course
• Complete John Sonmez’s marketing yourself as a programmer course
• Write 13 500 word blog posts
• Start email marketing on richiekastl.com
• Create a block to capture emails and send them to Mailchimp
• Create 1 sequence for new subscribers
• Create a books section on richiekastl.com
• Finish cabinets and doors
• Read these books
• Content Inc
• Bird By Bird
• 22 Laws of Marketing
• Small giants
• The Effective Executive
• Refactoring
• Complete C25k with Mandi (my girlfriend)

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:

Finish Ryan Robinson’s blogging course and book:

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

Begin Akron Marathon training

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.

Alternate day fasting until I’m 160 pounds

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.

Complete John Sonmez’s blogging course

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.

Complete John Sonmez’s marketing yourself as a programmer course

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

Write 13 500 word blog posts

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

Create a block to capture emails and send them to Mailchimp

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

Create 1 sequence for new subscribers

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

Finish cabinets and doors

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

Read these books

• Content Inc
• Bird By Bird
• 22 Laws of Marketing
• Small Giants
• The Effective Executive
• Refactoring

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

Complete C25k with Mandi

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.

Total Hours: 105

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:

1. Writing 13 500 word blog posts (10 hours)
2. Ryan Robinson’s blogging course and book (16 hours)
3. Start email marketing (9 hours)
4. Read Content Inc (5 hours)
5. Read The Effective Executive (6 hours)

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.

• Why you should use ACF
• ACF vs Gutenberg
• Using ACF IN Gutenberg
• Using ACF to build a React front-end for your Wordpress site

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.

1. Stop working around 7pm if I haven’t already
2. In bed no later than 8:30pm on weeknights
3. Wake up at 5:15am
4. Dedicate 1 hour of time to this blog before working

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:

The night before a productive day

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.

I make sure I get 8-9 hours of sleep

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 brush my teeth like a champion

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.

I take Athletic Greens

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 check my Trello Board

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.

I work on personal goals before working

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.

I check my calendar

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 work at my job

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.

Disconnect

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:

• A shirt company that would combat bullying
• A digital card game
• My personal site (not this one)
• A digital marketing agency
• A drop shipping specialty dice company
• And many, many others

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.

The 4 deadly traps

Let’s examine the 4 deadly traps that killed my digital card game.

1. The project scope was never defined.

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.

2. I didn’t create phases for the project.

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:

1. Concept
2. Prototype
3. Art

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.

3. I didn’t take it seriously.

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.

4. I didn’t have the skills.

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.

How I’m avoiding these traps

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.

1. The project scope

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:

• Choose a domain name
• Choose a Gatsy theme
• Edit it a bit to fit what I want
• Get a Netlify account
• Push it live
• Write one blog post

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.

2. The phases for this project.

The phases for this side hustle are:

1. Create the site
2. Start writing blog posts to build an audience
3. Define the brand for this site is and what the overall theme is
4. Keep writing blog posts based on what resonates with my audience
5. Build a course based on what my audience likes
6. Sell the course to keep this blog going
7. Then repeat steps 4 through 6 for eternity

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.

3. Not taking it seriously.

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.

4. I don’t have the skills.

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:

• Monday Wednesday Friday are doing days
• Tuesday and Thursday are learning days

The only materials I’ll permit myself to learn from are materials that I can apply immediately to my blog.

Conclusion

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.