[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Solopreneurs, what is your day and week like?
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Ask HN: Solopreneurs, what is your day and week like?
How do you plan your day? And how do you plan your week?
Author : _448
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-07-31 09:53 UTC (13 hours ago)
| newusertoday wrote:
| I just create tasks that needs to be done in emacs org mode,
| choose one of the tasks and start working on it.
| [deleted]
| philmcc wrote:
| "MONTHLY" Every ~3 weeks I print a ~3 week calendar with just
| 'one word' goals for that day. Double sided. If a project can't
| be subdivided I just repeat it. M-F of this week was just "Stripe
| Integration"
|
| All of this is just to make sure my trajectory is generally
| correct.
|
| WEEKLY Then, on Sunday I print out a weekly calendar broken out
| by hours, ~7a-11pm. Not because I intend on working that whole
| block (yikes), but so that at the end of the week I can see where
| my time actually went.
|
| DAILY I start each day with an hour of something that has
| absolutely nothing to do with work or coding. The last two months
| I've been learning Ableton, and I make myself generate a song
| snippet every morning. It can be crappy, it just has to be done.
| Turns out, that time adds up (WHO KNEW) and now I'm pretty decent
| at Ableton. Before that I spent time on a (rented) piano. If I
| save it for the end of the day I never do it or I'm too tired to
| enjoy it, so why give my 'joy/curiosity' the crappiest version of
| myself?
|
| Then the next ~4-5 hours I dedicate to mentally engaging tasks.
| "Hard" attention heavy work. 25 minute blocks w/5 minute breaks
| to stretch, email, text, drink water etc. After each block I
| write on the hourly calendar what I worked on, both to keep
| myself focused, but also so that I have a sense of having done
| -something- besides grind endlessly.
|
| By then it's ~1-2pm. I take a 20m coffee nap (most days) and then
| give myself the freedom to consider my workday done (if I want),
| or if I wanna work more, the next ~4-6 hours I do the boring
| brainless stuff. Minor bugs. UX tweaks. Email templates. Blah
| blah. A lot of this time ends up being "eaten up" talking to
| users, but that's fine.
|
| Then at the end of the day I take a glance at my hours and see
| how I felt about it, and write down, on the back of my
| Monthly/Sprint calendar what my day actually ended up being
| about.
| rozenmd wrote:
| I've been a solo founder with a full-time job for almost 4 years
| now (currently working on https://onlineornot.com).
|
| My schedule has been pretty much the same over that time: I keep
| a trello board with backlog/TODO/in progress/done columns, and I
| try to work around 2 hours each day.
|
| My best hours are in the morning, though I also exercise 3 times
| a week, so my work schedule is normally:
|
| - Monday evening
|
| - Tuesday morning
|
| - Wednesday evening
|
| - Thursday morning
|
| - Friday off
|
| - Saturday morning
|
| - Sunday morning
| makeee wrote:
| I've been a solo-founder for the past 12 years (currently:
| https://divjoy.com). I use a kanban board in Notion and work
| about 4-6 productive hours a day on average. Some days it's 2,
| some days it's 12, but I don't force myself to a super strict
| schedule because that has led to burnout in the past.
|
| I try to take a day off every week, but often it's random based
| on whether friends/wife want to do something fun on a given day.
|
| The only exception is if I'm leading up to a big product launch
| and need to grind through that "last 10%". In that case switching
| into hyper planning mode seems to help me a lot. AMA!
| njdullea wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| When you started your business did you have another job and
| build your own business on the side? Or were you able to jump
| straight in?
| makeee wrote:
| I was doing some contract work on the side while building the
| MVP, but switched to full-time right after launching it. I
| wouldn't necessarily recommend that though.. basically burnt
| through all my savings over 4 months. Right as I was starting
| too look for more contract work I ended up winning a $15k
| grant from YC [0] which bridged the gap until I got to
| profitability. Now at around $6k - $10k/m (not recurring, so
| it varies).
|
| [0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-
| school-2...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nocommandline wrote:
| I'm currently working on/running https://nocommandline.com
|
| A few months after launch (the MVP), I made some adjustments and
| below is a rough outline of my schedule
|
| 1) Reserve Saturday mornings for writing up articles that I
| intend to publish on the blog. I might not publish the article
| then or maybe even soon, but writing the article helps me
| document whatever issue I came across, worked on, learnt during
| the week. For example, I recently changed the layout of the
| landing page and needed a way to do some quick and dirty A/B
| testing. I have just spent this Saturday morning documenting what
| I did.
|
| 2) Mon - Fri:
|
| Mornings - Use Twitter to find chatter related to my product &
| niche. Respond/interact with this traffic. Also generally learn
| stuff about startups/business/technology. I discovered that I
| have gotten more interaction/leads from responding to others on
| Twitter than from directly tweeting stuff
|
| Evenings - I already have a roadmap so I try to put in a few
| hours working systematically through the roadmap.
| giorgioz wrote:
| I've been a solopreneur and founder of a bootstrapped startup for
| 8 years. I reached 20k MRR this summer. The sentence "It's a
| marathon not a sprint" suits well my schedule and mentality. For
| the first 6 years of my bootstrapped startup I used to work 6-12
| hours each day. (when I became dad 2 years ago it became harder
| to work few hours on the weekend though).
|
| I used to work every day, also during the weekend. That's because
| I'm most efficient just after waking up, both in the morning and
| in the afternoon after a 30 minutes power nap. You might not be
| efficient in the morning but in general I recommend everyone to
| find out when it's the time of day when they are most efficient
| and work that time every day. Better to work less hours but
| working every day during the golden hours.
|
| It's important that you love to do your daily work. In my case is
| coding, I love coding. If you don't love the core work necessary
| for your startup to succeed you will not be able to keep at it
| for several years.
|
| I recommend always sleeping those 7-9 hours per night that make
| you feel full rested. There is no point in overworking now if you
| will be tired or burnout later.
|
| If you are single and able to move, I recommend becoming a
| digital nomad and living in cheap/nice places. You can move to
| Thailand or Colombia or Portugal and pay less for rent and food
| and fun and all the savings will allow you a longer time to work
| on your startup. That said, even if you have more time you
| shouldn't waste it. Try to earn money from your project as soon
| as possible. In general it will take you 3-10 more times than
| expected to earn your first dollar. So if you have savings for 1
| year you should do plan to earn your first dollar in 1-3 months.
|
| The podcast Startup for the Rest of Us has been invaluable in my
| journey: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
| tofukid wrote:
| What's your product/SaaS?
| giorgioz wrote:
| waiterio.com an order management system for restaurants.
| Started as a mobile app 8 years ago and shifted to SaaS 5
| years ago. For bootstrapped solopreneur I recommend making
| products for piers like marketers/developers/sales/tech.
| Having non-tech savvy restaurateurs as customers has been an
| uphill battle I would probably not do again.
| fakedang wrote:
| Just to let you know that when I tried your website from my
| current country (UAE), it showed price units in the lowest
| denomination rather than in the standard denomination. It
| would be like quoting 49 cents per month instead of $49.
| RustyConsul wrote:
| do you get lonely being a digital nomad?
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