#39 - COVID

Hey Friends 👋

So, uhh this happened...

So bad news, yesterday evening I tested positive for COVID, so replies and tweets may be slower than usual while I focus on recovery. 😢🦠 Hoping to be back soon. (originally posted on Twitter.)

Soon after publishing last week's newsletter, I started to feel the beginnings of what I thought was a normal run-of-the-mill cold coming on but to be on the safe side I decided to do a COVID lateral flow test. Safe to say I was a bit taken back when it was a positive result...

The events of last Sunday made this week a productivity write-off before it even began but taking the time out to rest, recuperate, and get better did yield a good insight I'd like to share.

When you're in the trenches all the time, you don't see the overall direction you're fighting in.

It's easy to get lost in making progress, solving the next challenge, and trying to build the next project but without periods of rest to review the direction we're focusing our efforts in, will our efforts lead to us achieving the goals we set out for? Or something else entirely?

While reflecting on my efforts so far this year, I realized that it's been a scattergun approach, going from focusing on freelancing; to info products; to SaaS products; to community building; all while creating content on social media and my blog. Now, I could try dressing this up as having a multi-faceted approach to ideas and projects. But, I think that would be lying to myself to cover up splitting my efforts and time too thin. Ultimately, it feels like it's led to a lot of energy, but not a lot of progress.

To combat this, with my COVID now subsiding and energy returning, I'm going to put all my efforts into one project for July and see what the outcome of it is. And, it's not just going to be any project, it's going to be a hackathon. 💻 (Read more below.)

I look forward to seeing how this little experiment into focused work on one project goes, will I burn out? Will I crush the project with time left over? Or, something else, I don't know but we'll find out together. For now, I'm just happy to be passed (Or, nearly passed) COVID. 🙌

I hope you have a wonderful week, and I look forward to speaking again next Sunday.

Thank you for reading.

Coner x

Happy Hashnode Hackathon 💻

Yesterday evening the Hashnode newsletter was sent out filled to the brim with the usual awesome articles, but this time something else piqued my interest; this month's hackathon.

This month the hackathon is with PlanetScale, a powerful open-source, serverless MySQL platform. With the hackathon being on a platform like this, the possibilities are plentiful, so along with having nearly recovered from COVID and being excited to jump into a new project, could the timing be any better?

Thanks to my idea backlog being populated with the daily journal template I shared in a previous edition, I already have an idea that I'm excited to bring to life over July. I can't wait to announce the first stages of it in the next few days so keep your eyes peeled. 🤩

Finally, are you entering the hackathon? If so, let's crush this together, I'd love to hear more about your project.

Thought, Question, Challenge 🤔

• Thought: Being too busy, can be a curse as much as a blessing, don't neglect reflection.
• Question: Should reflection be a part of our normal behavior? Is there harm in reflecting too much?
• Challenge: Reflect on one of your goals, do your current efforts correlate with the goal's success?

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Questions

If you have a question you'd like me to ask me then I'd ask you to consider publically tweeting me it so others may be able to learn from it. However, I understand not all questions are suitable for the public domain in which case you can email me at hey@conermurphy.com

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