A Mid-year Check that Everyone Should Do - Here is Mine

It’s unbelievable. More than 50% of the year is gone.

This means a brutally honest check on my progress. I have never done this before. In the last few years, I’ve held only year-end reflections on my progress.

This year is going to be different.

This mid-year reflection allows me to check on my progress and to make the necessary corrections to get closer to my yearly goals or even to modify my goals.

In January, I decided to ship 10 products in 2019, while working full-time and doing 7 hours/week consulting for a startup. You can read more about my plans in this post.

I set up OKR framework to define the objective and KPIs for 2019. Here is how these look:

Objective: Create things I enjoy for other people so their lives will be better or funnier. This means building and shipping products.

Key results:

Build and launch products:
- Learn to code -> Key result: spend min 4 hours/week learning to code
- Build and ship products -> Ship 10 products in 2019
- Make money from it -> 1000 USD/month revenue (strong validation of doing what people need)

Improve my personal brand
- Publish actionable content regularly on my blog -> Publish 2 in-depth posts every month (I also have a guideline I have to follow)
- Promote my content -> Fully execute my promotional checklist for every content I write (2/month)

Shipping products is my most important metric for the year.

Here is the update on the KPIs:

Build and ship products - Plan: 5 in the first half of the year; the number of shipped products: 5. - I did it!

Products I built:

Learning to code - Plan: 12 hours/month, but on average, I spent 3.5 hours learning to code. This seems significantly lower than I planned.

Make money - Plan: 1K USD/ month. Actual: 1 USD/month - yes, I’m making money! :D This metric wasn’t that crucial for this year but was added as a KPI to measure product success.

Personal brand:

Publish actionable content on my blog - Plan: 12. Actual: 2

Promote my content - Apart from sharing them on social media and on my newsletter, nothing happened here. Ouch.

Humble achievements:

Sold one of my side projects (for 100 USD, so I’m rich!)
Got featured on the front page of TheNextWeb

Next steps

So, what happens next?

The biggest problem is that I've spread myself thin in the last 6 months. I’m working 40 hours a week and also doing 7 hours of consulting, plus learning to code, shipping products, writing blog posts, promoting content. You get it.

I did almost everything, and apart from hitting the most important metric (build 5 products in 6 months and 10 in a year), every other KPI is just lagging behind.

Following this path won’t help me reach my goals (plus, considering that my son will be born within a week, it will be even harder). So, here are the changes I’m making:

Won’t stress about publishing actionable posts, apart from the bi-monthly update posts. Since there are no actionable posts, the promotion won’t be necessary.
I keep focusing on the single-most important things. In order to be able to ship the products, I need to improve my coding skills, so I have to spend more time doing online courses (minimum 4 hours a week). In the meantime, I will work on the products, applying the things I’ve just learned from the courses.
I will cut back on consulting hours. The minimum hours I have to spend on it is 5; currently, I’m working for more than 7 hours. Reducing it by 2 leaves 2 extra hours for coding.
On a high-level, I won't focus on improving my personal brand but rather on building products and learning to code. I need to ship another 5 products. That’s the most important thing for the next 6 months.

Conclusion

Despite not hitting most of the KPIs in the first half of the year, I still achieved much more in 6 months than in all of 2018. I shipped 5x more products, had insane progress with coding and learned a lot along the way.

If you’re doing or planning to do something similar, I recommend you stay focused on the single-most important thing. Don’t try to change the world within a year. I know it’s hard because there are so many things we want to do, but focus is essential. There is no other way.

Which one would you choose: delivering mediocre results on many things or doing an excellent job in one or two selected areas?