Connor’s Q2 Review
I have a lot of projects. I’m trying to get better at organizing the work that I do, because my ideas often feel scattered. This year, I’ve divided my time into quarters, which feels like the most appropriate way to time-limit my experiments. This allows me to dip out easily when something isn’t working, and to have a recurring marker for reassessment and refinement. Q2 has been great. I have a better day job, I had several “big breaks” in terms of clients and opportunities, and in general I am very happy. Here are some of the details of things that happened in the past months.
Bloggo
Result: Okay.
I rebranded my entire bloggo and wrote short posts entirely in lowercase. They were easy to produce, I published them on a schedule, and they were well received on Wordpress. Unfortunately, it was incredibly difficult to keep up the momentum. Posting daily worked, but sometimes it felt like I was posting meaningless garbage. So I stopped, and my bloggo is now on hiatus until I figure out what to do with it. I like blogging, but I have yet to find a way to do it in a consistent and meaningful way.
Newsletter
Result: Success!
I had an e-mail newsletter through Tinyletter this quarter and it was well received and well followed by my standards. I honestly was surprised at how many people subscribed. Again, I started out strong and then after right newsletters I ran out of steam, but I am happy with how it turned out. Maybe I will do this again soon if I have something to say, but again it feels wrong sending out e-mails in the name of consistency rather than content. You can check out the archive here.
Twitch
Result: Still in progress.
On my Twitch Channel, I am attempting to create the feeling of being in a writer’s room, but on the internet. So, every Sunday I show up and write for 30 minutes and invite people to join. This has been disheartening and not very popular, though I have successfully outlined a five part mini-series that I am proud of. My hope is to harness the internet to collaboratively write a thing, and this method has been my best attempt yet, even though I did virtually all of the work. You can check out the Google Docs here.
Interview Series
Result: Success!
We’ve had so many good interviews and gathered so much good information, more than enough to do meaningful work with. This was a successful implementation of targeted learning. The interviews taught us podcasting, provided us with market research, and built our community, all at the same time. Having a body of work also snowballed our credibility and allowed us to get more and more high profile interviews with people who had previously never heard of us. At this point, many of the interviews have fallen into a predictable rhythm, which for us means that we need to be more selective with our interview subjects, or to find a different formula for media creation. All in all, I am very proud of our work at The Orbit. Go team!
Conclusion
Still trying to find the most sustainable way to create meaningful media on a schedule. This is a delicate dance and will require ongoing self-assessment, but we are well on our way there. The goal? It’s to become self-employed in a way that is reasonable. Even today I face burnout when I’m actively trying to avoid it. It’s a process. For Q3, I want to shed away the unnecessary frills and focus on the thing that works best, and from there try new experiments in the margins. In the spirit of Cory Doctorow’s advice to send out ideas like dandelions because one is bound to take, this next quarter is going to ideally be full of things that I am interested in, like video essays!
Addendum
A list of things that I’ve also been working on that I didn’t feel like writing a full on paragraph about:
- Learning A-Frame on Glitch.
- Secret vlogs on YouTube.
- Reading a lot about internet law and economics.
- Learning Google Apps Script.
- Watching a lot of excellent YouTube (thanks to bae).
- Doing consulting work for three clients.
- Actually playing video games (shoutout to Lito).
Got ideas? Wanna chat? Wanna collab? Hit me up on Twittaaah.
