Shutting down my side projects to find focus

Last year was all about generating opportunities. Saying yes to everything. Building a new startup every month.

I purposefully went out and started more things than I could maintain. I allowed myself to do things I knew weren't sustainable in the long term. Be contrarian to common advice.

For the new chapter of my life, I should rethink my strategy. Make sure that I don't drag over habits and patterns from the experiment that don't serve me anymore.

I will be joining a company and working there for at least a year. I will go deep into this project. On the side of my main tasks, I will learn new relevant things, and interact with communities.

I strive to be a human that is present with work, life, play, and the ecosystem around me. In order to do this, I need a simple life. That means developing a different attitude towards opportunities.

Shutting down side projects

I will shut down Slapper, Imitate, MediaChopper, VideoFly, and TokenBird, and I pause new development work with freelance clients (Rude Boy's and Holo World).

This means changing the landing pages to goodbye pages, redirecting the domains, or closing them altogether. Forcibly shut them down.

Why can't you keep XXX running? You don't need to do anything. It’s easy to fall into the trap that you can have things running without interfering with your main attention. Things will take space in the mind.

Multiple projects can give you the illusion of making progress when all it’s doing is giving you a reason to procrastinate from something hard.

The most appealing way to resist the truth about your finite time is to initiate a large number of projects at once. You get to feel as though you’re keeping plenty of irons in the fire and making progress on all fronts. Instead, what usually ends up happening is that you make progress on no fronts—because each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead. You get to preserve your sense of being in control of things, but at the cost of never finishing anything important. - Oliver Burkeman, 4000 weeks

Oliver Burkeman’s book 4000 weeks hit me hard. I'm going to cultivate the Joy of missing out and seek to be intentional about where my focus and attention will go.

Let’s go.