Sunday Night Planning

Channing and I have a planning meeting on Mondays, so we have yet to plan for this week. But here were our big goals for last week:

• promote our collaboration with Product Hunt
• prep for and give a talk at the Priceonomics Content Conference
• design, build, and deploy new user profiles
• ditto for "hover cards" that appear when you mouse over a user's name
• ditto for allowing users to follow each other
• start writing an article or two of our own for Indie Hackers

This is in addition to our standard weekly tasks, like sending the newsletter, catching up on our interview backlog, manning Twitter and the forum, reaching out to authors whose writing we'd like to feature, recording and editing a new podcast episode, emails, meetings, etc. So I'm proud we were able to get it all done, super productive week.

Every week feels like a battle between the "treading water" baseline tasks to keep IH running, and a small handful of tasks that actually push the site forward. Hopefully we can continue to increase the proportion of our work that falls into the latter category.

This week I'll most likely be focused on designing product timelines/pages and even getting out some sort of prototype if things go really well. In the grand scheme of things, the goal is to make IH into a better "product" that's more valuable and sticky for all of you, and then eventually focus on more growth stuff.

Thanks for sharing this tip, Zack! I've never tried this, but it sounds sensible. It reminds me a little of DHH's "I fucking love Mondays" post in that it takes advantage of the optimism available at the start of the week.

I've actually done sort of the opposite. At the end of the week, I send my team a status update on the projects I'm responsible for. I feel like there's dual benefit because it keeps my teammates aware of my progress, but it also forces me to recognize my accomplishments for the week.

A lot of times, I'll sit down to write my weekly update thinking that I'll barely have anything to write because all I remember is chasing down a bug for days or waiting blocked on a task because someone hasn't emailed me back, but then I check my commit history and sent emails and remember that I actually did a bunch of stuff and it lets me close out the week feeling a sense of accomplishment.

Cool post! I'm always interested in how people set their goals.

I find Sundays are the perfect time to review your week and plan the next. I always have a Sunday call with my team to discuss what we have achieved over the week and what goals we should set for the coming week based on our monthly goals. We then split these goals into actionable tasks to be done during the week. We upload these tasks to a shared document so we can all view them (I also write them on a big whiteboard at my desk as I like seeing them throughout the day).

I think this is a great way to get the most out of your time during the week and it definitely makes you feel good on a Sunday evening knowing that you have taken action to reach your goals in the previous week. It also gets you ready to jump right back in on Monday morning :).

All the best with your goals for this week!

Rationale for my goals:

One thing I have noticed is that users who have subscribed to paid plans have on average submitted 15 keywords whereas the recent users evaluating the product have only submitted 11 keywords. So one goal for the week is ship some product improvements to incentivize users to add more keywords.. such as automatically grabbing keywords from their linkedin profile, and emailing users with a nag reminder if they have fewer than 15 keywords.

I also noticed that users who have subscribed to paid plans have on average applied to 1.7 freelance programming jobs directly through the Code For Cash interface, whereas recent users who signed up have on average applied to 0.20 freelance programming jobs. So my next goal is to institute email and Slack nag reminders until they apply to at least two jobs.

My final goal for the week is to start an ad campaign to drive paid traffic to the codefor.cash/delegate page. "Sorting through the tone-deaf junk on Upwork is time consuming and risky. Let Code For Cash find your next freelance programmer" – going to target CTOs, CEOs, and tech leads.

I used to plan my week on Sunday, though lately I've been setting my weekly goals on Friday as the work week is wrapping up.

It feels good to know that anything I didn't get to this week is already scheduled in my daily planner and prioritized. :)

I also like to check in on my projects at the end of every day so I know if I'm on pace to complete them by their goal dates. I started doing this in college with a spreadsheet (now I use Strides, but even just the act of checking in on a simple note is good) and it helps to keep things in perspective and prevent procrastination.