Going from consumer to producer to nothing.
Addressing the slump.
It’s been about 3 weeks since my last post here, and well over a month since my last book review. My website domain expired this week. It’s clear that my consumption of good content (which can be proxied by my book reviews, though I don’t review every book I read), and production of thoughts and ideas has gone down. It’s not to say that I have been doing nothing - there are a few side projects I have been working on but they don’t make up for my general lack of output (and quality input). Here is a recap of my side projects.
The Tech Startups Space
This project is a work in progress. With this, I intend to create a small, high trust community of people. A social network, but smaller. Here, my approach is slow but continuous progress - the kaizen approach.
You can check it out here. I will write a more detailed post about the mission and vision of this in a later post.
The Tech Startups Bookclub
This is a spin off of the social network. It’s a federated goodreads alternative. You can read more about it here. Since I have quit goodreads, you can see what I am reading right now on my profile here
Telegram Reading Habit bot.
This is a project that I would declare dead now. I built this with the intention of getting people into the habit of reading daily by feeding them bite sized portions from classics via telegram DMs on a daily basis. I created a gamified system that allots points for every “part” you read and set reminders so that you maintain a streak and eventually fall in love with reading.
The idea seemed pretty solid on paper, but somehow didn’t stick. I created an MVP which you can check out on telegram @DailyReadingHabitBot or by clicking here. I felt the downfall of the idea was that I couldn’t breakdown a book into small chunks in a fun why using my convoluted algorithm. None of my initial users continued using it. If you are curious, do check it out, and tell me why you didn’t like it.
Women Founders India Shorts
This was something I picked up to get a little better at django. To skip the boiler plate, I forked Woid, another django based aggregator and integrated it with Newspaper3k, a brilliant and easy to use web-scraping tool for articles.
You can check out the project here.
I built this as sister utility to the great platform Women Founders India created by Namratha Vasu.
The aggregator is designed to scrape women related news in startups and provide a succinct summary of it on a daily basis. It’s simple, clean and minimal - something I admire about it (even if I do say so myself).
I wouldn’t call this project dead, but completed. I think it has, and will continue to fulfill its intended purpose with little to no future upgrades.
Habits HQ
I don’t want to call this project dead yet - I’d rather refer to it being temporarily suspended till I clarify the vision for it myself. Right now, it’s pretty bare bones as you can see here.
The idea is to either create a resource or a community of people who want to change or shape their lives using habits. I even experimented with this:
I posted this on r/habits
People did join my discord server, though I myself didn’t prioritise putting effotr into organising it properly, so at the moment it’s dead.
If you like the idea, you can help revive it by joining the server here.
Maybe some day in the future, Habits HQ will become something that can add value to people but at the moment, the project is stalled.
Shunning etiology.
Yes, I had a slump. I worked on things, but they don’t justify my lack of reading, writing and tangible creation. In times like this when I am having a general slump, I find that not looking for an etiological explanation for myself helps me. What is etiology?
Etiology (pronounced /iːtiˈɒlədʒi/; alternatively: aetiology or ætiology) is the study of causation or origination.
Me finding a cause for my slump (lots of work, not enough time, being tired, burnout, etc. ) would be the etiological way of looking at my slump and justifying it. In my view, this fixes my future based on my past, and it’s not something that can help me reach where I want to be.
There is no need to know how I got here; that’s irrelevant. I need to see how to get out of this slump.
My domain name expiring was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. Me writing this essay on my slump is my first step towards getting out of it.
Peace, and death to covid.