3 months of Underland

Hello again 👋

As my soon-to-be wife aptly puts it, it feels both like a short while and ages ago. A lot happened since Kevin and I initially spoke about moving forward with Underland and it’s been a pleasant journey so far. From a personal standpoint, it’s certainly been a change from the arguably easier cruise that is a University degree compared to working for yourself. So what have I learned so far?

I Live in Calendar-Apps now 📆

While I was perfectly adequate in managing time allocated to university projects, time management for client-based work is massively different from assignments and exams’ deadlines. There’s no one size fit all solution and estimating time for a project gets better the more you do it — I have to thank the many side projects I had during the previous year that unknowingly served as preparation for this.

It does get better the more you do it. There will be hiccups and things that you assumed would only take a few hours, might instead take days. It is a learning process and one that you can take with you everywhere you go, being for a master’s or PhD, or to a new workplace. At Underland, we tried to bootstrap the process by using a few different time-tracking apps. While we couldn’t find one that we both enjoyed using, they gave us that extra push in formalising our work routine, to the point where we now aren’t tracking to the minute, but to the half-day which is easier to estimate.

Calendar-apps are still an absolute life-saver. I get lost following recipes so keeping track of meetings and site-visits for events takes its toll on me. Even a single note on a project deadline allows me to better organise the week in my head so I can be as productive as possible.

I don’t know how to do everything and that’s OK 🤘

I can barely do my laundry: I know of 2 programmes and those will be the ones I use until the end of times (or until my washing machine breaks and I’m forced to learn another couple of programmes). That’s absolutely fine — you focus on what you know or what you’re good at and, if and when needed, you can go and rely on other people for things you don’t.

This is not endorsing a “stop-learning-new-things” mentality but rather recognising the value in spending time on any given task. Ask yourself if the cost of time devoted to learning a specific topic is worth it. If you’re learning to improve yourself, learning for a hobby or to do a task that you wouldn’t normally do.

Why do I find this valuable information? Because I see it happen too many times without the learner gaining significantly from it. I’m not about to create a sales brochure with the same degree of perfection as someone that’s done it for years. Nor will I spend time developing a tool to be used in house when a paid solution is available. Of course not everything is black and white and these spends may scale up and hurt you in the short run (especially if you’ve only been running for 3 months) but it certainly frees you to go and look for more work or work on that pesky technical-debt.

Working for yourself is immensely gratifying 😍

Because everything comes in 3 acts and I love stories that end on a happy note (massive love for romcoms — note to future me: pls delete before publishing). I am absolutely loving running Underland with Kevin and everything in-between. And while it’s been more like a rollercoaster, rather than Julie Andrews singing and dancing and spinning at the top of mountains type of experience, it’s been fun and I wouldn’t trade if for anything.

To be able to work on projects that you like or run events that you wish existed is an unbelievable experience. There’s an incentive to keep learning and push yourself to do new things and that incentive is you and you alone. It feels amazing!

Wait, is that it? 💁

I could focus on events we’ve run, project’s we’ve seen to fruition but, as I started writing this blog post, I saw myself thinking what would past me rather be reading. Projects and events, although super fun to do, come and go and there’s always new ones. I do find it interesting how certain things sounded like an absolute breeze and how others sounded like the biggest wall to climb. Some of those met the expectations or surpassed it, others not so much. There’s plenty more that I didn’t mention, mostly because I said to myself I’d keep this under 5 minutes reading-time. And for that there’s always the “6 months of Underland”.

See you then!