What I'm doing now - May 2016



Last updated: May 10th, 2016

I've created this page to help me allocate the right amount of time and energy to what I need and want to do. I will update this page regularly. This page does not contain general information about me.

May 2016

May will be a month characterized by Continuation, as I'm following through with the writing of my first book.

Family

With the kids being kept entertained by my mother-in-law, we were able to escape for a brief weekend city trip to London last weekend. It's only the second time since my first kid was born that me and my wife were able to spend some time just the two of us, which was very nice. The kids are enjoying their last week of vacation, and the bad weather of the last 2 weeks seems to come to finally come to an end, we are looking forward to spending more time outside. We've also a birthday party coming up this month!

Day job

At Erasmus MC we got our first test system and are beginning active technical testing sessions. We're also preparing the first Review Day (mid-June), lot's to do.

Side projects

At this moment I have 3 principal side projects going on:

  • Writing my first book
  • Continuing my idea extraction efforts as part of The Foundation training
  • Push harder on the promotion of EmailMerge.cc

I've made really good progress with my first book. At this moment I've written about 70% (28 of 41 chapters) of the content I've planned to cover. I plan to finish the writing in May, then work on editing (still need to figure out how I'll manage that part) and preparing the release. I've sticked to selecting a chapter during my morning and evening commute and just getting to it. I would not necessarily say that this process is much fun to start with, but there is definitely an aspect of pride in sticking to it. When hitting a difficult chapter, I sometimes pause and look at the other train passengers around. When I see them playing Candy Crush or frantically writing WhatsApp messages, I somehow get motivated to stick to my process and create something instead of just consuming other people's stuff.

Regarding The Foundation, I've reserved my plane tickets and spot in the Villa to attend the Foundation Europe meetup in Barcelona (June 9th to 12th). While my family will stay in Den Bosch, I am very excited by this event and am expecting to "recharge" motivation-wise by exchanging with other "Foundationers". Last month I've also joined 2 mini-mastermind sessions with a Dane and New Zealander living in Thailand where we've shared on each other's Foundation and other efforts. For the next session planned mid-May we're expecting to be joined by a new Foundation student from the UK.

On the EmailMerge.cc front the previous month has been quite nice, with sales covering threefold the costs. I've been brainstorming about a possible different approach to focus more on getting folks on the mailing list and starting with automation workflows increase the demo-to-paid ratio, but I'm not sure I'll get to it this month though.

My wife has also been getting more and more interested in starting her own/our first online business, so we're currently loosely following Ramit Sethi's Zero to Launch process and are about to start the idea validation phase. We've also got some FBA ideas floating around. As always, the challenge is to focus ;)

Learning

My study of the Italian language using the Duolingo platform is progressing smoothly. I haven't skipped a day since having started. I'm not sure exactly at what percentage I'm currently at, but it's progressing nicely. I've actually spoken Italian in public for the first time last month! I introduced myself in Italian during a meeting at the hospital where 4 Italians had traveled to The Netherlands, and everybody clapped to my short speech. That was actually pretty nice!


Inspired by the /now page movement. You can go back in time and read my previous /now entries.