Project update #10 - Motivation drying up

It's 21:00 here in Prague! So much for starting earlier. Anyway, lets get started. Lets dive in into my journey of building new iPhone app, or to be more precise, the journey of doing all the 'other things' so I can focus on building the new app.

What I've been up to these last 4 days

1) Finishing my new company website

I know, this is getting old. But there is a lot of stuff in the site that needed to be ironed out, and I've spent most of Friday afternoon and Saturday morning working closely with my friend who is coding the site.

I am glad he is willing to fix and tweak everything I ask him to, but at the same time I am a bit annoyed that there were so many small glitches and missing things which I had to point out to him one by one, and these slowed us down significantly.

But the other way of looking at it is that I have somewhat high standards, and I need everything to be perfect. Literally. So overall, I am really glad he has been okay with that.

Now I need to finish several small things, like exporting comments from Wordpress and importing them to Disqus, updating all posts to use the new styling and code highlighting, and coming up with a new 'about' text.

2) Working on my new app

On Thursday, I worked on the new app, and I am quite happy with the progress I made. The core component of the app is now 99% finished. It should take just ~1 day to finish it completely and then I will be able to move on to other parts of the app. I am really excited about that!

The core component took much longer than I thought, mostly because of those three things:

• 1) Too optimistic estimate of what it will really take to make everything work. This one is a classic.
• 2) Other distractions. Like the new website. Or some troubles with the client job.
• 3) My need to make it perfect. This is the core part, and I am planning to make iPad version and then Mac version of the app in the next 6 months. Since the whole app stands on this core component, I wanted to make it rock solid. I wanted to make the code easily readable, adjustable and as clean as I possibly could. So it will be easier for me to maintain it in the years to come.

3) Having bit of a crisis, again

This might be connected with the fact that from Thursday to Saturday, I'd been terribly tired. I was getting up at 6:45 most of this week, and this has its consequences. There were some difficulties with the app, the website was taking too long, and overall, I was just extremely annoyed.

This peaked on Saturday evening, when I was questioning if this whole indie effort of mine is just a big bubble and I am just not cut out for it. After all, I've been trying on and off for the last 5+ years, and I am certainly not where I wished to be by now. It was one of those times that I just wanted to fall flat on my face, give up and just do something else.

But I've been invested for too long to do that. I've come too far, and I have too much hope and expectations of the new app to just say "Scr*w it, I quit.". Plus I knew that it was just the tyranny of the present moment. I've been through similar states too many times and I know that they come and they go. I also knew that I was too tired, with too little energy to think straight.

4) Some rest

Today, it was much better. I got some rest and this feeling is just gone almost entirely. I actually was at the summer house with my parents. I didn't even take my laptop there to make sure I won't give in to the urge to work on something.

I took with me a book, though. The Copywriting one, and read it during part of this morning. There was a chapter about direct marketing and things got really interesting. I love how the author gives concrete examples and describes the techniques how to come up with effective copy that really resonates with target audience. I believe there is a huge potential in knowing more about this, and this book seems like a great way to learn a lot.

The lesson

I know I promised a lesson in each update, but this time, I don't think I have any. The only thing I would say is: if you are feeling like everything is going south, take a break and get some rest. But I talked about that several times in these updates, so it doesn't really counts. But for today, I don't have anything else, sorry.

Plans for the next week

I want to launch the new website, for serious. I plan to give it most of tomorrow and do everything that I need to so it can finally go live and I can stop stressing about it. I am also curious how people will like it, because it's a huge step forward from the current version.

On Saturday, I will take part in a local Apple Watch hackathon held by STRV.

Apart from those two, I want to mainly work on the new app and really push it forward. I am extremely late on the project (the original date of submission to App Store that I had in mind just two months ago was the end of April, so..

Anyway, if you made it all the way here - thanks! I do plan to change the format significantly in the near future, because the original vision was to make it more about the new app itself, and from what I see, I defaulted to mostly writing a diary. Which is not bad in itself, but it's probably not very interesting to most people. That'll be all for today, stay tuned for the next one next Wednesday!