Personally, I found focusing to be far worse than not focusing. People don't do resolutions because if they did them, then life would change. Not necessarily by a lot, but something changes. If you had finished building it in February, you'd have to figure out why it hasn't had one paying user. And now that you've built the app, you can still bring the resolution forward next year, but hesitate to.
So I find the lifehack is to have two targets. You procrastinate on one then do the other. You take baby steps to avoid selling that app and end up doing the half marathon.
- Alternate marketing weeks and coding weeks to force myself to actually do marketing work.
- Focus on SEO and get to 5,000 monthly visitors.
- Get to $5k MRR (which I think is a bit more realistic than my $10k goal last year).
I'm off by an order of magnitude on the traffic goal and still at $0 MRR. Here's my 2022 year in review post where I laid out those goals: https://www.teaminal.com/blog/2022-year-in-review/ (2023 coming soon)
1. Fix one of my abandoned projects since 2018 or so: Tremendous success.
I planned to get it up for the users who paid a one time fee $25 for it in the past, and the product had a ton of tech debt. Heroku was charging $5-$7 for it so I hesitated. Ended up getting hosting fees tax deducted and getting it up and running opened up a firehose of potential wealth. Made new friends as well, which counts for more than money.
2. Released some products at work: also tremendous success, and we're barely keeping up with this. Kind of fun just randomly searching the internet and finding a review or people on social media offering tips on your product.
3. Learn langchain and code a raytracer in Android totally using AI: Mixed
Ironically, this was probably the easiest. Bear in mind GPT-4 was only released this year. At the start of 2023, 3.5 was pretty dumb and there were lots of complex architectural plans to teach it to do this. Now I could probably just upload a PDF and some template code. I might just do this next week before the year ends.
In the stoic tradition, I don't compare myself to others, only compare to who I was yesterday, and if I didn't get better, then it's a hard fail. So my resolution is to continuously improve from the day before.
But also, I do not understand the intent behind a comment such as yours. I do not mean to single you out, you just happened to be the most recent commenter I have seen this from.
Comments such as yours do not address the question at all. Is the intent to just pat yourself on your back? Is the intent just to comment and say something (despite its relevance)?
> Comments such as yours do not address the question at all
I answered. "my resolution is to continuously improve from the day before". Sorry if it sounded vague, but I have no 'specific' resolution other than to improve. That could be anything. Working out, writing, blogging, coding, whatever.
It didn't help that I finished building it in November, but well... here I am still waiting for that one Stripe notification.
Next year I'll try something easier, like running a half-marathon or something.