Friday rundown, unwind my brain

It was a chaotic week. You wouldn't guess it from what I published or from the fact that I finally finished a few critical things, but moving from one home to another made it chaotic.

Right now my old home is almost empty. All I have left is a dining table, and that's where I do all my work. This week, that table is my entire office.

Nothing and everything at the same time

The week felt like I achieved nothing and everything at the same time. Luckily, I was ready for some turmoil. I knew the move was coming, so I wrote ahead.

It proves again that doing my content creation on the weekend always puts me at ease. When a week like this one eats my weekdays, the posts for my SaaS and my other blogs are already written. Nothing falls over just because I'm carrying some stupid boxes in my trunk.

Pushing Echo Room to October

I think one of the smarter decisions I made was postponing Echo Room to October. I'm officially moving next week, on September 30th. That's only 5 days from now.

If I had pressured myself into making Echo Room content and squeezed in some half-ass podcast, it would have been worse than doing nothing at all.

Read also: Echo Room: I can't launch in September (probably)

A first episode is the one people judge the whole show on. Recording it between packing boxes, tired and distracted, would have set the wrong tone for everything after it. I'd rather launch a month late than launch something I don't stand behind.

Fewer posts, still more than average

I also blogged a lot less this week, which I more or less predicted on Monday. But less is still more than average. Including this post, I wrote 6 blog posts between Monday and Friday.

Read also: Monday preparations, good to go for the week

The biggest win was TWO

That's obviously me celebrating in silence: my SaaS MVP is finally done and ready for BETA, which I wrote about last night. And now the real work starts.

But I feel like a true winner. Almost 1,000 commits on GitHub. Three months of trial and error, then one month of improving the app, stripping things out, and ironing out a gazillion flaws.

I've said it was ready before, back when it wasn't. This time it is, and that's why it feels different.

Read also: My docs editor SaaS app was, and still is, seriously flawed

This means I need to unwind my brain now. Zoom out again and recalibrate what I should do about marketing, BETA invites, and the Mac app. After months of staring at one app up close, I need to step back and see the whole picture before I decide anything.

Read also: My MVP is ready. I still don't have a marketing plan.

It's safe to say I won't be short on things to document in October, and I'll think most of it through in blog posts.

The biggest fail was Netlify

This one started with high hopes and ended up in the fucking toilet.

The moment I added Idea Bench to my blog, I knew which idea I wanted to try first: Random Facts. My plan was to use it to test a Vercel alternative. I want to reduce my single point of failure, and putting a few low-risk projects on a different platform seemed like the cleanest way to start.

Read also: Comparing Vercel alternatives: can't tell half of them apart

That idea got torched the moment I deployed. Netlify changed its approach and now runs on credits, even for commits from GitHub.

For a small side project I want to tinker with whenever I feel like it, spending credits on every push kills the whole point. I'd end up thinking twice before every commit, which is the opposite of low risk.

So I removed it from Netlify and put it on Vercel, where it's now my "balance-burnout" project. The thing I switch to when I need a break from everything else.

Read also: I tried Netlify. I am already out, I think

The idea is almost done as an MVP, by the way. I added more facts, started making it look prettier, and I'll write a dedicated post about it soon.

What's next?

I'm still moving, so I'll take it a bit slower this weekend. But there are now a lot of things I need to address for myself.

For TWO, that's a content plan for next week. Beyond that, the usual stuff: checking the Pinterest schedule, making backups, and so on.

Tomorrow I'll jot down my concerns and thoughts, including the permanent sponsorship idea I had for my $168M challenge.

Pfff, fuck, I don't know right now. But I think my biggest task is planning carefully what October should look like, and whether I can still keep up. So I think I'll write a long post tomorrow about my October goals, paired with a Monday prep post on Monday (duh), and see what I can achieve that week.

This system seems to work for me. Monday prep, Friday rundown, and a weekend of writing ahead in between. So I'd better stick to it, no matter how chaotic my life is right now.

Final note

All in all, this week was a total win. The house is as good as empty, Echo Room got pushed, and Netlify didn't survive the week. None of that matters much next to the one thing that did happen: the MVP is done, and TWO is ready for BETA.

I don't have October figured out yet. That's tomorrow's problem. Tonight I'm closing my Friday early and finishing the entire second season of Flex X Cop, now that all the episodes are on Disney+.