January 7, 2017

Shipping Something Every Day

One of my New Year Resolutions this year is to ship something every single day. By shipping, I mean releasing something out to the world, and it can be anything. For example, today I’m publishing this blog post.

It’s been a week, but I can say that it’s very, very challenging. I like it because it is very simple but it pushes me outside of my comfort zone. Seriously, you just do the work and release it, and it is harder than it seems.

So far this week it was random stuff - from favicon for this blog to a feature that I was delaying for at least 4 months. The funny thing is that feature took me only 1 hour to create… The other bits were slightly random - landing page, changing few other pages.

I have also noticed that the way I spend my time during the day is slightly different to what it was a few weeks ago. Now I ask myself a question before starting to work on something - can I ship it today?

I know it’s not very practical for every single item as some stuff will take more than 1 day to ship. But the goal is to either prepare this work, so you can ship it within next day and ship something small today. Or divide this bigger piece of work and ship that.

It also became slightly harder to procrastinate as every single minute you notice that whatever you are doing right now isn’t getting closer to shipping today’s work.

The only part I would like to improve is to do more planning on what to ship in the next few days. Otherwise, I feel like running around every day and wonder what to do so I can ship. It’s more about setting a bigger goal and laying down the smaller steps to get to this goal.

Few helpful things that helped me so far:

• Daily reminder. I use Loop Habit Tracker app that asks me a question every day at 4 pm - “Did you ship something today?” - 4 pm isn’t too late to do something before the evening.
• Having a sticky note next to my mirror, so I see it every morning and every evening when I get back from work.