Another Bout Of Goal Setting

So I have noticed my productivity has been fairly low when it comes to my personal projects. Usually this happens when I am a bit directionless and in the past I have found a good way to get the ball rolling is a bit of medium term goal setting.

It is funny as I usually fail to reach my goal but almost always learn a lot from the process. I am usually highly productive as well. A goal gives clarity on what I should work on.

Previous goals have been about getting number of visitors to a previous blog or growing users on apps. I learnt that informative post that solve peoples problems are many orders of magnitudes more popular than the more verbose personal ones. I predict this post will not be popular :)

One area I don't think I have done much goal setting is financial. Well I have set goals but never committed to them. Perhaps it is the programmer in me say financial goals are in some way dirty. I think I am getting past that:)

I should at this point say I like my day job quite a lot and the goal is not to replace that. Anyway it would not be realistic from my starting place as a medium term goal. The goal will be more like double my monthly income by the end of the year. That would put is at the level of taking my family out for a couple if dinners a month. Yep, I don't intend to reveal exact figures.

So I got thinking how would I change what I do if I committed to that target?

I would definitely focus on android. The web has not been kind to me so while not excluding all web stuff android seems to make more progress when it comes to revenue.

I also need quality apps. A well executed app is better than many poorly executed apps.

This has to be tempered with the fact I need to iterate on ideas fast. I admit I don't understand what makes a popular app. I have a collection of ideas to implement and to find out if any are popular I need to create them as fast as possible. As quality cannot suffer because of this that means productivity has to come from avoiding feature creep and getting to the essentials of the ideas. Familiarity of tooling will aid productivity. If I can produce one good quality app every 6 weeks I will be happy.

Finally I need to develop the apps that are popular more than the ones that aren't. That is pretty obvious isn't it?

So my plan is to double the income I get from my personal projects in may by the end of the year. Nothing like a bit of goal setting to re-lite the furnace of productivity. Lets see how it plays out.