Hey everyone!👋🏽
Given current events, we might not all be feeling as motivated or as productive as we were just a few weeks ago (maybe more). But you're probably working on something really awesome and we'd love to hear about it!
What are you working on right now? How are you maintaining your focus? Tell us about your project (and add links if you want to)!
I'll go first:
I'm working on two books right now. (I know!) One is a translation of a book I released two months ago called The Developer's Guide to Content Creation. The translated version is in Brazilian Portuguese and is being done by a developer and an agency in Brazil. I'm really excited for it to be released in April.
The second one is a brand new book with all-new content. It's called The Developer's Guide to Book Publishing and is meant to help developers navigate traditional publishing and self-publishing. I started writing it in February and shared a progress report on Twitter recently.
Staying motivated. It hasn't been easy. For one, I wrote my first book in 11 days and did everything—writing to editing to book design to release—in just six weeks. I didn't take a break between both books, which I should have! Then everything with COVID-19 happened, and it has been hard to concentrate. I'm working to be more patient with myself. I even pushed back the release date by a month to give myself the space to do a great job without stretching myself thin. But the good news is I'm feeling a little bit better every day. These projects mean a lot to me and even though it might seem that they don't matter in the face of our new reality, they absolutely do.
Our projects matter. :)
Looking forward to learning about what you're working on!
Top comments (10)
I'm working on a tonne of things!
I actually find that with COVID-19 I've been more motivated. Just having the space to do work on any of the things I'm creating has boosted my productivity! I am also really wanting to gain financial freedom and that is a huge motivator!
I'm really looking forward to your next book! It's going to be super relevant to me 😃
WHOA this is really awesome, Eric! I need to take a page from your book. I just looked at your first vlog; what are you using to record? Smartphone or a different camera?
Thanks for watching ☺️
I've so far just been using my Pixel 2 xl's front camera! The quality is definitely good enough for me right now.
I'm currently doing application maintenence surrounding a Jenkins CICD pipeline. I'm keeping motivated by constant common njcation with my 3 closest work friends (2 are currently in my team) and we joke and discuss what we are doing similar to how we would if we were in our cubes beside one another. We have gotten more work done in the last two days than we normally would in the office. I have also written from scratch two new blog posts that are in the queue for publishing in coming weeks. I've had to setup a folding table in the garage to work for now, but luckily the weather has been mild enough to not be an issue.
Is the application maintenance a project for work or a personal project? How are you and your colleagues staying in touch?
And re: gotten more work done—this is really inspirational; honestly. What's your trick for keeping focus?
I am not doing very well at maintaining focus. I struggled with this before COVID-19 went into the full force the last few weeks. Moving forward, I am making an attempt to pick something and just do it instead of flip flopping all day.
This week I made some headway on a freelance project that I was stuck on. Reading the supporting docs helped!
Besides that I have a lot of React coursework to catch up on and a backlog of blog posts I would like to write.
I hear you loud and clear. I too was having issues with focus before this happened.
That's awesome about progress with the freelance project! Are you dedicating the weekend to freelance work or a combo of freelance, coursework, and blog posts?
In terms of priority, coursework, blog posts, then freelance.
Chores should fit somewhere in there, but I'm trying to be realistic 😉
First; it's really nice what you are doing :) just keep it up.
For me am working on:
And am feeling more motivated during these days, altough routine in is almost the same knowing that am a freelancer. But I feel like I have more time and energy.
So am planning to do side projects after finishing the above mentioned projects edits.
I'm working on Pragma (pragmalang.com), which is a language for building GraphQL APIs. I think the trick to maintaining focus is reminding myself of the reward of releasing my work to the world and seeing how it helps people. It's a never ending source of motivation. Also, it's very useful to stay away from social media. It's very distracting, especially with what's going on.