John Jago

February reflection

How much did my indie projects grow in February 2024? Let’s find out!

A summary of progress:

This month, I started to keep track of hours spent on each project, to see how input and results correlate.

I also want to mention that I don’t think focusing on metrics like website visitors should be the goal. It would ideally be number of people helped, which is more difficult to measure. As these projects grow, I hope to shift my focus to more meaningful metrics over vanity metrics, but for now, it’s easier to see progress this way.

ProjectTime spent (hours)MetricResult
Dashify9active installs<10 (+0)
""revenue$0 (+$0)
LinkQR6.3visitors9
""revenue$0
undo.studio9.4posts written4 (-3)
""visitors83 (+44)
johnjago.com5.6*posts written0 (-4)
""visitors527 (-55)
Twitter3.6followers53 (+17)

* This time was spent redesigning instead of writing.

I removed a couple “projects” which I’m not actively working towards that were in last month’s table.

Thoughts

I worked a total of 33.9 hours on these projects. It’s likely a little more as I’m sure I forgot to record some hours. I also only record hours that I’m pretty focused, so how does it compare to a typical full time job?

Let’s say that in the average full time office job, you work a total of 40 hours each week. On the high end, each day, 4 of your 8 hours are deep work (great book, by the way), so meetings and time spent walking around an office don’t count. Each month you can work a maximum of about 87 deep work hours.

Being familiar with how office and home environments can be, even 4 hours each day is a stretch. On the safer side, if we say 3 hours, that would be about 65 hours of deep work each month.

With that in mind, I’m working about half a typical office job in terms of deep work hours, which is about right considering I’m still wrapping things up at my startup, which I hope to fully exit by April.

Previous reflections


👋 This is my work journal, a series where I write daily about trying to make a living building a bootstrapped software product.