Developing a Sustainable Plan

After another nervous breakdown, it was pretty clear that I had hit my limits for the time being and recovery was absolutely necessary. My broader plan for the upcoming week is to take lots of breaks and meditate to heal the mind.

In the interim, I analyzed why this happened and the answer is pretty clear — I was pushing too hard. It was inevitable as I was looking to replicate a video’s success. Fortunately, that goal was achieved a few days before the aforementioned nervous breakdown.

Now, it is crucial to gather all the learnings from the past year, about life, content creation, and career, and build a sustainable strategy. Unfortunately, I still feel that I am a year away from my goals, something that hasn’t changed since past couple of years. This is a tough pill to swallow, even though it is evident that I am closer than ever, but it is what it is.

Gotta turn the page and focus on the next thing.

Anyway, I dissolved my current routine (it was fading away already, making it easier) and have created a new one, outlined below.

Weekly Routine

• Monday: Create a video. In case of a race weekend, write the race recap script.

• Tuesday: Create a video, ideally for the alternative channel. In case of a race weekend, it should be the race recap video.

• Wednesday: Break. Finish work as early as possible so you will have more time to do nothing. 

• Thursday and Friday: Write articles or chapters of any of my books.

• Saturday: Weekly review (handwritten journal) and a whole bunch of nothing.

• Sunday: Administrative work such as scheduling Medium and, in the future, LinkedIn posts. Typically late afternoon-early evening.

Disruptive Days

As the past few days have demonstrated, important events and duties can pop up left, right, and center. If I try to stick to my original schedule, it will blow the lid off and I start getting irritated by others while losing control over my mind.

The ambitious me wants to do it all. The wise me knows that it is not possible.

From now on, I will take ample breaks around these disruptive days and will pause my content creation efforts entirely. The only kind of tasks that can be done (in extreme circumstances) are administrative tasks.

I lead a fairly normal life so it won’t be that detrimental to my overall progress.

One primary reason I was pushing that hard was because I wanted to replicate a particular video’s success. Let me break it down.

Why I Was Pushing So Hard

At the time of writing this, it’s about 14 months since I decided to become a content creator. Of course, I made plenty of mistakes and went in many wrong directions because I literally knew nothing. 

I set a year’s deadline and thought that I will reach at least 1000 subscribers on YouTube and around 100 organic visitors to my website.

Neither happened.

When the 10th month passed (since I decided to jump into content creation) I had no results to show, and depression hit. After a couple of days of moping around, I chose to turn this negative spiral into a positive one (a lot of other bad shit happened within those 10 months which fucked me up and I was low af).

So, I pushed hard.

In the past two months, I promoted my website hard on Medium and got about 80 readers and a retention time of ~4 minutes. This was a great sign because I finally knew how to get readers to my website. I jotted the lessons and went on to do the same thing for YouTube.

I created about 30 videos in the past month alone. Crazy volume, right? Anyway, in that process, I upgraded my equipment and became more comfortable presenting in front of a camera. Almost 15 days ago, I dropped a video that got about 2k views in 3 days.

At the time I didn’t even have 15 subscribers and most of my videos had ~50 views.

It was my ‘iPhone moment.’

My next objective was to replicate the success of that video. The goal was to reaffirm the things I learned and build a reliable video creation framework that will set me up for long-term success.

I dropped another video in that channel four days ago and it has ~4k views. Moreover, it’s retention time is double than the earlier one. Right now, the channel sits at 57 subscribers. 

Although hitting the magic 1000 seems unrealistic by the end of this year, 100 certainly seems doable.

Obviously, now that I figured out how to promote my website organically via Medium and create good videos for my YouTube, the next target is to build a sustainable process, which is outlined above.

Speaking of numbers, I want to hit ~10k subscribers on YouTube and ~100 organic visitors/month on my website before going to LinkedIn. But I am getting too ahead of myself.

Looking Forward: Enjoying the Vacation

Today, my plans are to watch the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and relax. Then, I have to attend a friend’s wedding and stuff my mouth with great Indian food.

Since this is a race week, I will write the race recap article on Monday and the rest of the routine will follow. As I am on leave this week, the workload is 50% of what I normally do on a typical day, so I can wrap it up by early afternoon and chill the rest of the day.

All I gotta do is wait.