Month Review - April

The months are disappearing this year! Classic blog apology - sorry for the lack of activity on this blog - I've been quite busy!

It's been a good few months. Songsmith's really starting to take shape - most of the functionality is there, so I'm tidying things up and getting some feedback before I start to finalise things. The closer it gets, the more excited I am that it'll be a great product!

This month, I've also paid myself for the first time! It's the first pay I've received since I left my job in December. I've done a bit of work on the side, building a website and playing at an event which has meant I've had the funds coming into the company to allow a salary. It's a step of faith that things will continue to progress.

I incorporated (became a limited company) back at the start of April, so I'm now officially a company Director. I thought about putting it on my email signature, but I think it sounds a bit pretentious still! Perhaps when I start selling units I might do that...

Wedding plans are coming along well. The invitations went out over the last couple of weeks, and these have been hard work to do! My wonderful fiance has worked her socks off to create them, and we've both spent many long nights cutting, sticking and writing them.

Lessons

One of my big lessons from the last few months is to set good deadlines. I've given myself a few tough but realistic deadlines, and have pretty much met them all, but the best thing about this was that it made me focus my work. It's so easy to be distracted by fiddling with stuff, but when you know you need something done by the end of the week, it helps to clear the mind! I've obviously worked with deadlines before, but when you don't have anyone over you, telling you what to do, I've found it quite a steep learning curve to figure out how best to make me work!

Welcome to May!

Month Review - January

January's been a challenging month! I started working full time on my software at the start of the year, so here's look back at the month:

Achievements

I've got quite a bit done, but a lot of it has been "under the hood" stuff which isn't that visible. I've been tidying up some fundamental things that I'd left earlier in the project - things are a lot better now, but it's quite frustrating to not be able to see any dramatic change!! I'm happy with what I've got done, but I'm not quite as far on as I hoped I'd be.

Lessons

I've learned that it's important to have a life! I cleared all of my spare time at the start of this project, cancelling commitments and activities, in order to focus on what I'm doing. This has given me more space, which was great, but I've been struggling to switch off from the work, which is bad! I've been amazed at how much this kind of thing has affected me. The solution so far is to make time for some evening stuff to try and balance me out a bit. (...well, as balanced as it's possible for me to be...!)

Looking forward to...

Getting married!! The wedding plans are coming along slowly, and Laura and I are very much looking forward to having a break on honeymoon! I'm also looking forward to getting the software sounding better - there's some tweaks I need to make, but once it's sounding good, it'll feel like I'm getting somewhere!!

Roll on February...

One ring to rule them all...

...only joking. I'm now an engaged man! It all happened a couple of weeks ago, but things have been so busy recently that I've only just got around to putting it up here.

True to romantic form, I wrote a song to sing to Laura and talked some friends into forming a small band for the occasion. Anyone who's heard me sing will tell you that I need a very good band behind me to make me sound good, so much cudos to them. She said yes, which was fantastic - and then we spent the rest of the weekend rushing around and telling everyone the good news.

I promise to post an update on business soon!