What I'm Working On Now

Ever get asked, "So what are you up to now?" Yea me too. So this page answers that question. Inspired by Derek Sivers /now page movement.

Initial Plans For 2020

Personal

  • Spend as much time as possible with my daughters. My oldest is now in college across the country so my time with her is limited, which is all the more reason to make our time together count.
  • Write every day - Journal.
  • Write every day - Creative (blog, tech, marketing emails, newsletters, guest posts, etc.)
  • Read at least 15 new books in 2020. I've had a goal of 16 or 20 the last few years and never seemed to make it. So I'm lowering it to 16 this year. You can follow the progress on Goodreads. (2019 challenge results)

Business

  • Launch AnyHow, formerly known as Grinch, to the public.
  • Work hard on business development for Insight Miners.
  • Complete water project at Colonial San Martin (rollover from 2019).
  • Work from at least 5 different countries, aka "workations", in 2019. This is a lower number than the previous few years because I am trying to focus on products a lot this year. This involves staying in one place more often (at least for me)
  • Attend at least 1 non-tech related conference.
  • "Ship" something daily. Progress displayed on my WIP Profile

What's Actually Going On

Trapped in Nicaragua

As a result of COVID-19 global pandemic I have been trapped in Nicaragua. Luckily I have my own home, am safe, and plenty of supplies and resources to ride out this pandemic. As of now it looks like flights won't start operating from the country again until July 2020. I arrived in Nicaragua in late February, my flights home were cancelled and all flights ceased since then.

Daughter Time

Unfortunately my daughters are home in LA in quarantine with their mother. They're safe and sound but because of my trapped status out of the country, I haven't seen my youngest since February and my oldest since January. We chat daily (family group chat with the 3 of us) but we can't spend any time together at the moment.

Writing

I've basically done zero writing. Not even in my journals. Sure I wrote a bunch of help docs and maybe a few small blog posts for AnyHow but that's about it. I do have a large post about remote work that's about 70% done. I need to wrap that up and publish it as it's pretty important given the current situation, especially for small businesses struggling to adjust to the new norm of remote work.

Reading

Currently reading The One Thing by Gary Keller. I first heard of him on the Tim Ferris podcast and I thought he was very compelling. I bought his book before I finished the interview and now am getting around to reading it. So far, it's very good.

See the Goodreads Challenge for the overall reading goal progress.

AnyHow

AnyHow is live! We launched it in mid January 2020. I wish the launch was more of a success in terms of new users but it wasn't. Since then we've been working, albeit slowly, on marketing. I have to admit this part is hard to focus on because we just want to build it. We've had a few releases since then and added some great new features and have some more ready to be released.

I'm slowly working out the marketing pieces as well though. I plan to hire someone to help with cold email outreach and will be trying other methods of customer acquisition.

Insight Miners

Things are progressing very nicely here. I can not disclose to much but in my 2019 retrospective I wrote a bit about things. Read that if you're interested.

Colonial San Martin

Since I'm trapped in Nicaragua I figured I should invest some time and get some things done over at Colonial San Martin. I'm happy to say things are coming along. The progress has me very motivated to start selling lots because I want to build my beach house already!

Here are a few things I've got done during the current COVID situation:

  • Re-cut the community roads.
  • Planned the exit canals for rain water throughout the community.
  • Install new point markers for each lot. Essentially each marker sets the edges of the lot property line. I don't even know the right word for these in English but in (Nicaraguan) Spanish, it's "mahones".
  • Run water pipes to community tank storage and from the storage to each lot (this is in progress, should be completed by this coming Sunday.)
  • Put nice looking fences around each lot so it's clearly visible the size and space you'd be purchasing. (this is in progress, should be completed by this coming Sunday.)

Workations

Clearly the workations aren't going to work out in 2020. I still have a Costa Rica surf trip on the books for September but we'll see if that plays out or not. I don't have high hopes.

Conference

COVID killed this, though I honestly had no plans on it anyway.

Ship Daily

While I haven't used WIP since January 2nd, I have been shipping "something" daily. Of course, this is part of my day-to-day job of just running my businesses. So it's definitely not what I intended and hoped that WIP would help me focus more on shipping something, no matter how small, on my side projects daily. Sadly this year it hasn't. No excuses, I just haven't made doing this a priority. I hope that changes as the year continues.

Last updated May 19th, 2020.