My most productive month ever!

In January I completely revamped my life in several areas:

• diet
• exercise
• sleep
• writing
• reading
• working

And I also launched a app that helped me be much more productive (more about it later).

I don’t think I’ve ever been so productive and in this post I’m going to show you exactly what I did. My hope is that you can get some inspiration and/or motivation to do the same with your life! 💪

New Year’s resolution

You know how we all set high goals every year but by the 2nd or 3rd week of January most of us end up giving up?

Yeah… I used to be that person.

Year after year after year, I was setting high goals at the beginning of the year, just to fail miserably shortly after… It was quite demoralizing.

But something about this year was different…

I managed to push through that period and actually get to have one of my most productive months ever!

And it pretty much all sums up into one word: habits.

Well, maybe actually two words: tracking habits.

The start - January 1st

I saw this habits app build by a fellow indie hacker a while ago and wanted to give it a try. I downloaded the app on January 1st and I went straight into action.

This is how the app widgets look like. Super cool IMO!

(Not affiliated link btw, I just love the app!)

First, I had to figure out what were my main goals for the year. So I sat down and wrote down the following:

1. Get in the best shape of my life - aka 15% body fat (initially at 27.5%)
2. Work more towards my $1,000,000 goal

And for those goal to be achieved, I knew that I have to develop certain habits like:

• Eat less crap
• Exercise more - focus on calisthenics as running was already at the level I wanted
• Write consistently
• Start Reading
• Work - especially focused work

Now, some of you might think that doing all of them at once were too hard and I might end up in another burnout… Sure you could be right, but… I made it easier on myself by starting small on the new habits.

Diet

Although I neglected my diet a little bit in the last part of 2024 which got me back to 84kg, I still developed pretty solid habits in this area in the past 2 years (I went from 104kg down to 79kg during this time), so it wasn’t too hard to put some restrictions on.

First thing was to quit sugary foods and cut out all the junk foods.

I focused on eating lots of protein and veggies and tried a low carb diet - apparently this helps with those crashes that we experience after eating them so… decided to give that a try.

The initial period is usually the hard part, but I was fueled by the challenge and the fact that I could check the daily “no junk” and “no sugary” habits, so it went by easily.

Results:

• Went from 83.60kg down to 80.45kg.
• Body fat also dropped from 27.5% down to 25.9%

Exercise

I’ve been running a lot in 2024. And by a lot I mean… A LOT!
More specifically, in total I ran 3000 km last year.

So as you can see I love running, but I knew that I need to add some bodyweight training too to grow or at least keep the muscle that I have.

So starting this year I focused on doing 4-5 days of calisthenics per week.

Results:

• I managed to do calisthenics 23 days this month, while also running 228 km.

(I was sick in the first week of January and was forced to take a few days off, but oh well… Happy I recovered and could continue my workout journey)

Writing

For writing, I decided that I want to write something every day. It didn’t have to be something specific. And I started writing short bits about how my days went by, what I was learning, etc.

I know that writing is a very powerful skill to have, especially in business, so I wanted to develop this skill and become a better storyteller. (Let me know how I’m doing so far lol).

Results:

• In total I wrote 56 posts.

Haven’t yet published any of them as most of them are personal, but the goal for the future is to do that more.

Reading

To be honest this wasn’t on my bingo card on January 1st, but I had another thing that I had on my bing card, and that was: Ditch watching TV.

We’ve spent A LOT of time watching tv series and movies. I think we easily spent 2h per day on average. Which is A LOT!

So one of the things we did at the beginning of the year was to move the TV out of the bedroom.

This was probably the biggest change in our lives!

Now, instead of watching TV in the evening we either play some board games, or we chat, and then we read something.

Results:

• Both me and my wife read 2 books in January, which is pretty awesome!

I also feel like our conversations changed and we both grew a lot in this area. When you read something you want to share it, and it quite fantastic what you can learn.

Working

This category is a big one because, to be very honest, I’m not the most hard-working guy… 😬

I became a programmer for a reason. I wanted to write software do the things for me so I can do something else.

While the above is not a bad idea in itself, I had days or even weeks with little to no work done. I was procrastinating a lot.

Watching YouTube videos is good and all, but not if you do it all day, every day. Knowledge is only powerful if you use it.

So another one of my goals was to get my sh*t together and start working towards something. I wanted to feel the satisfaction of building something again.

So I started working on indieaction.club. And I’ll be perfectly honest - the main reason I built this app was for me.

I love gamifying things as you might have already figured out, so I decided to build an app where I can track the time I work on different projects.

And the fun part about this is that I used the app to track the time I was working on the app. How meta is that? Lol 😂

Nonetheless, I’m super happy to report that I went from working 15-20 mins per day, up to working 240 minutes per day! And not only that but while I’m in these 30min working block sessions, I’m fully focused on the task that I have on hand.

I believe that this way I can accomplish more in 1 hour than most people can in 4 hours while getting distracted every 10 minutes.

Time will tell how much this will actually convert into revenue, but so far I’m very proud of my achievement!

And of course, I’ll continue to work on bringing more gamification features to the app. You’ll soon get rewards while being surrounded by other fellow builders! Super duper fun!

Results:

• Launched an app and made $200! 😄

Final Thoughts

Looking back at January, I can confidently say it was my most productive month ever!

The combination of building healthy habits, writing more, reading more, and focusing on work turned my life around.

Some key takeaways from this month:

• Small consistent actions can lead to big results
• Gamification really works (at least for me!)
• Reading is a fantastic alternative to watching TV
• Building in public keeps you accountable
• Working in focused time sessions is way more effective than multitasking and allowing yourself to get distracted

I’m excited to keep this momentum going through the rest of the year, wondering what other things I’ll be able to accomplish!

If you want to join me on this journey of being more productive while having fun, check out indieaction.club - I’d love to have you there!

Here’s to many more productive months ahead! 🚀