What on earth am I doing…

What am I doing in the UK all day?  It is a fair question…

I had a solid plan after my departure from JobAdder, things were moving in the right direction even during the second lockdown I felt I was making progress.

Then suddenly life handed me another of those whack-a-mole moments and everything changed.

Finding myself back in the UK for the longest period since I made the move to call Australia my home is strange.

Due to the nature of hospital visiting hours and there being a constant state of flux in where my mum is ultimately going to end up (location-wise) makes planning things hard.

The last three months have been tough mentally, emotionally and financially. I am not going to lie there have been some tears, some anxiety and frustration but also some relief and joy. It has been a mixed bag of emotional states and I have had a pretty good run of those in the last few years so strangely I am getting used to them, but not sure if this is a good thing.

My brother and his wife had twins a couple of years ago and they had a pretty hard start in life. Being born very premature and remaining ICU for weeks after the birth, the poor little mites were in a bad way. However, they (Theodore and Maddison) are now happy and fun little toddlers that light up the room whenever they go to destroy it.

A silver lining to my stay is I get to spend some time with them as an Uncle, something I would never have had the opportunity to do in an alternate reality and I feel blessed to have had that opportunity.

I have also reconnected and spent the most time I have since I was a kid with my Dad, this has been really nice and again something that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do if it wasn’t for this situation.

Mum is currently stable and improving, albeit still on ventilation in ICU she is breathing for part of the day unaided as they try to wean her off the ventilator. She has a lot more movement but a long way to go, however, we are confident she will get there it will just take time.

Due to the improvement in mum, I feel I can direct some of my brainpower to forge on with some of my key goals.

Building, Learning and Health

Being in a kind of self-imposed lockdown far away from home has encouraged me to go back to the core things that I’ve either wanted to do for a long time or that I have put off.

Personal hobbies

I love music, always have and in a past life trained in Audio Engineering and whilst this wasn’t a career I wanted to pursue the idea of producing music has always been a goal. I want to do this for me, not to play in front of people or anything like that, just because I have musical ideas I would like to express.

I have purchased some equipment and am currently training online in some of the fundamentals of a few genres I like, in particular, Drum & Bass (I am from Essex after all).

5x paid courses – 1 complete.

YouTube – I have soo many saved YouTube videos on beat production curated and ready to use and I must say Stranjah has been most helpful.

I have given myself till Christmas of this year to produce x3 tracks that I will publish, they may be pretty rough but ‘completion’ is key here. If you don’t complete something you’ve never finished it, and if you have never finished it then you always have an excuse why it may not be perfect or ‘good enough’ and never show anyone.

Complete it, if it’s shit that is ok, learn, do it again, complete it and repeat until you get better and can get feedback and improve.

Exercise and health

I use to weight train a fair bit over the course of my life and it’s something I have always enjoyed but in recent years it’s been put to the back of the queue. Not anymore.

I have been hitting the gym around 5 days a week for the past few months and it feels great, I am stronger than I have been in years.

It is easy for me to put on weight and I have been up and down over the years but I am now on a crusade to lose 10 – 12kgs by the new year. I am already 4kgs down and progressing well via the weight training and Keto diet (controversial I know) but it’s working so far. For extra motivation, my brother has just lost 12kgs (2 stone) in the last 3 months and is looking good.

Career learning

This is something you should never stop doing if you like your job, even if you don’t you should do it if you intend to stick with it.

I have enrolled in 2 courses to help keep me active in this and I shall produce a series of blog posts on my learning and notes throughout each of the courses to keep me accountable.

Startup growth program training used by some of the worlds leading companies and a SAAS startup lead generation course that may give me a different perspective on what I have already done.

Business/software building

Now my mind feels a little clearer I can concentrate on ideation and MVPs at last, something that I love.

There is a shift to low code, no code development that is breaking down the barriers of entry for people like me when developing ideas into usable products.

Due to this, I have invested and allocated a bunch of time in learning these new tools and so far it is going really well.

4x courses on this, one halfway through and I should complete it in the next day or so where I build a fully functional site like Twitter (this can be taken with a large helping of salt).

With this knowledge, I will use it to not only build some useful tools myself but when outsourcing some of the work to third parties I will understand what they are doing. I can then ensure they are doing what I need and help speed the process up and pivot where necessary.

I have a development company that specialises in both no-code MVP/product development and produces conventional development where needed but I will only engage them to build once I have a good understanding of the process, limitations of no-code for my projects.

There are currently ~5 projects I have in mind for no-code development, two I have partially built using a different tech that I’ll be migrating over if suitable.

I intend to have one project completed by early January next year at the latest via outsourced development and one self-built for who I already have a customer that may not be on no-code to start with.

Conclusion

With all the challenges that I have been faced with over the last few months, I do feel like I am getting some of my brain back and it does feel good.

I have set myself a few big challenges so let’s see if I can pull them off.