40-Hour Week Challenge II: Day 3
April 10, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzI thought I’d give an update on how my second attempt at my 40-Hour Week Challenge is progressing.
I’ve just started the 3rd day and things are going very well, thanks to my great performance yesterday:
Timeline: April 7th 11am – April 14th 11am
April 7th: 4 Hours
April 8th: 8 Hours
April 9th: 2 Hours
Total: 14 Hours
That leaves me with 26 hours to hit in 4 days, an average of 6.5 hours a day, meaning I have to definitely stay on this. Some people have also requested that I mention what I actually do during these hours, so here’s a rough list of what I’ve accomplished (if you can call it that) in the past few days:
- Wrote blog posts
- Went through all my e-mails and took care of them (This always takes a large portion of time away)
- Did a few things from my ‘todo’ list (mostly minor stuff so far such as removing pop-ups from Movie-Vault, editing a description on Merendi.com, updating the year for top movies on Movie-Vault, etc.)
- Went through all my forums and took care of any needed business such as responding to any PM’s, making sure everything was running okay, and responding to comments and suggestions posted
- In addition to above, I added the NoSpam! vB Plugin to CarForums, which had a CRAZY amount of spam, and spent a long time banning dozens of past spammers and removing around 100 spammed threads. I also added a new forum to CookingForums and moved all relevant threads, and added a new forum on MovieForums and moved all relevant threads
- Talked to some people on IM regarding work-related stuff; sometimes this strays a bit from actual productive work and so I need to avoid that
- Put Halflife.org up for sale on a bunch of forums; have a buyer already who will be purchasing it for around $2250
- Put Movie-Vault.com up for sale on a bunch of forums
- Set up a new item in my PFO Cafepress store and sent out “Thank you gifts” to a couple of my mods at PFO (PFO Beer stein and t-shirt)
- Installed a plugin on PFO for a contest I’m about to launch there, had to investigate and modify it to suit my needs as well.
- Talked with my reviewer for PublisherSpot; negotiated a higher price per review in return for faster turnaround time.
- Instructed my programmer to add a new feature to PublisherSpot and aided him with any questions he needed
That’s mainly all I did. I don’t know if that sounds bad for 14 hours of work, but some of the things such as checking up on the forums and cleaning them up, doing my e-mail, and putting my sites up for sale take up a lot of time.
So far, I’m very satisfied with what I’ve accomplished in the past 3 days, although these past 2 hours I’ve been working I think I could have been more productive.
PublisherSpot is doing well and I have a simple but major feature coming soon, as soon as my programmer finishes it. I also have a bunch of updates and good news about it as well, which I’ll probably blog about in the next day or two.
Anyhow, that’s it for now. So far, so good…
Sounds quite productive! Good work. Take it up a notch; finish strong!
Way to go Tyler 🙂
Nice work, looks like you got a lot done. Keep it up!
Well done, you’re getting a lot of work done!
Don’t worry about that straying off topic… I have been a programmer for almost 15 years and one idea that we always kept in the back of our heads was that you can’t work ALL the hours that you are ‘scheduled’.
4 hours of coding in the morning – with a lunch – and then 4 hours straight at it again will kill your enthusiasm for the job. You need the break and diversion occasionally.
Very nice effort. Thanks for the breakdown of time, very interesting. Congrats on the quick domain sale too!
Tyler, would you consider using open source content management systems for your internet ventures?
I think that having custom-made applications already hurt you on the sale of movie-vault (that’s what shoemoney said). Open source software is free, there’s a lot of support available, and if you choose well, you’ll have a lot of features available and expansion capabilities (also for free, and without needing to hire a programmer). The only thing you might need to invest in is in a good design.
I chose Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) for my websites and it works great. Highly recommend it.
Good luck on the 40-hour challenge this time. When I did my review, I suggested you brokering two domain sales for me to increase your hours worked but it looks like you have a sale of your own. 🙂
Fred,
Movie-Vault is programmed horribly not because it was custom built but because it was custom built by ME! And from when I was a teenager just starting to learn basic Perl.
I believe my actual programmer that I hire to be one of the most competent and gifted programmers out there. His only downside? He takes forever and is obsessive-compulsive with security and proper code so much that it’s most definitely overkill.
I will always prefer custom applications when possible (affordable; I’m not paying to redevelop a forum when vBulletin is so powerful and massive), and PublisherSpot is a good testiment to that. It seems so simple from the viewers point of view, but it’s actually pretty complex serverside.
Open software definitely has it’s benefits, but also has many pitfalls, some of which include being “forced” to download updates ASAP as everyone is aware of security holes, not being able to do EXACTLY what you want unless you heavily ‘hack’ or modify the code, and then you’re falling right into the area of custom again…
it’s doable, I mean damn not working 40 h a week would be a dream!
the definition of ‘work’ is fairly loose imo on the internet.
i mean, by replying to emails, commenting on blogs etc.. in your spare time, you’re building backlinks and gaining contacts all the time.. so technically you could class that as ‘work’.
any time online i regard as ‘work’ as i’m constantly coming across new sites, seeign things i like and don’t like, learning new information.. so even though i may just be browsing and out of work mode, i’m still absorbing information all the time.
If only everyones lives were as easy as this 🙂