EntrepreneurshipProductivity | 4 Min Read
#29 - We Can't Win Them All
We won't achieve every goal, deadline, or project. It's a sad but real fact and this week, I share how I experienced just that on my latest project.
Hey Friends 👋
I hope you all had a great week this last week, for me, it's been a week filled with ups and downs, joys and frustrations and just about every other emotion in the middle. It's definitely been a bit of a rollercoaster...
So, for the last few editions, I've been giving weekly updates on my website redesign and self-imposed a deadline of the 22nd of April 2022 for the MVP launch.
And, as you may have noticed, it's now the 24th. So does this mean the website is live? 👀
The good news is it is live and ready for the world to see! 🎉🥳
(Link at the bottom of this edition).
But, the sad news and the driving force behind this edition is I didn't achieve the 22nd of April deadline... Well, I did and didn't. Let me explain.
On the 22nd, all the work was complete, tickets closed and merged into the main branch, ready to hit publish.
But, as I hooked up Vercel to deploy the site, the build failed... 😢
At the very last moment, I found out Vercel doesn't support Node 17.x that I had used for the project and instead only supported up to Node 14.x. This blindsided me as Node 16.x is now the LTS version and not 14.x...
As a quick aside, it actually turns out this isn't due to Vercel dragging their feet but rather AWS dragging theirs. Vercel runs on AWS, so if AWS doesn't update, neither can Vercel. So, for the time being, we're stuck to Node 14.x. Come on AWS...
Anyway, this was the reason I missed the deadline for publishing the website even though it was ready to go live. On the day I was already cutting it fine, so I didn't have the time to resolve the new issues. So, in the end, the website went live one day later than intended (23rd of April).
But, while this was incredibly frustrating and annoying as I really wanted to hit that deadline, it taught me a valuable lesson.
We won't hit every goal/deadline and that's not a bad thing.
Sure, it's annoying to miss a deadline but it gives us a great opportunity to learn and improve. Why did we miss the deadline?
- Was the goal too ambitious?
- Did we forecast wrong?
- Did we not plan enough (my mistake)?
- Something else?
If we hit every goal, we'd assume everything is rosy and nothing needs to change, but this isn't the case; there is always something we can improve upon. After all, no one is perfect.
Going forward, I'm going to carry on setting goals/deadlines and pushing myself to deliver ambitious ones. But, something I'm going to also trial is a review period.
Because I do everything on GitHub nowadays and use milestones to track my work; after the milestone is finished I'm going to spend some time reviewing how it went and see where I can improve.
In essence, I'm doing a one-man scrum system just without the BS. 😂
And, on that note, I hope you enjoyed this week's edition; if you did, consider dropping me a reply and sharing why. I'd love to connect with more of you.
Until next week, thank you for reading. 🙏
Coner x
Personal Website Redesign 💻
As mentioned earlier the website is now live and out there for people to use (and hopefully enjoy). 😅
I'd love it if you would take a moment to check it out and let me know your thoughts, I'm always keen to hear people's feedback and see how I can improve.
Overall, it's been an amazing journey over the last few weeks. (Maybe a month, can't quite remember how long I've worked on it. 😂).
I've learned a lot of lessons in organising a project and structuring my work on GitHub and I can't wait to take these lessons forward into my future projects and beyond.
Thought, Question, Challenge 🤔
- Thought: Missing a goal/deadline is only a failure if we fail to learn from our mistakes and correct them for the future.
- Question: Have you ever missed a goal/deadline? How did you bounce back and improve from it?
- Challenge: If you're currently working on a project, pick a deadline and try to deliver it by then. Try to be as realistic with yourself as possible and see how you find the process and what you can learn from it.
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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
