#170 — 🔍 Week in Review

0:00  
What's up everybody? This is Lola ojabowale, founder of lunch pail labs, welcome back to lunch pail daily lunch pail daily, my personal audio diary on building and growing lunch pal Labs, which is a digital product studio based out of Atlanta, Georgia. It's Friday. 

0:19  
So we're on our Week in Review. So starting with the goal and vision, I'm always reiterating this based on like the template I use, you know, lunch pal labs, where we're driving to a stainable economic engine, it's a products and services company. And I've got a revenue goal attached to that for this season. And through lunch pail labs, personally, I'm all about honing my craft and conceiving, designing, building, launching and growing products, and getting to consult with really dope and cool companies. So I'm iterating on the craft, I'm trying to get as good as possible at like building and shipping. Like, that's just my focus. And also, on the personal side, still getting to live a life of balance. So I would put this in the category of what many other people would say is a lifestyle business. So want to be able to do cool things, but also not be not my whole life be like lunch pail apps. 

1:20  
And I've got a set of habits that I think will take me there. They include things like writing every day, and some product work and taking care of myself and like go into the gym. And for this past month, I've been 100 100 on sticking to my habits. And so now as we go through January, because I'll have to have some really big conversations with myself about like, are the activities that I'm committing to daily, actually getting me to where I want to go. And I think looking at them now, I don't know, I don't know, um, I think it's up in the air there. 

2:05  
So let's get into the meat, we've got our reflection focus for this week was really like client work, and then ship 30 for 30. So I mentioned this, he listened to any of the episodes this week, during this cohort for writing ship 30 for 30, where every day we're writing an atomic essay, what went well, every day, I did actually write an atomic essay, I did not publish publicly, like on Twitter, all of the atomic essays that I did write, but I did actually do that. And I'm a little ahead of the curve, because we're technically starting with publishing on Saturday. And really my thought process there is in some ways, essays are like little mini products. And so being able to have an idea, ship it, see the analytics of how it's working. Not only helps me iterate on that skill and habit, but also helps me communicate better, which I think is important for writing copy and all sorts of things, working clients. So that's my explicit goal there. I also started a new thing this week called Sprint tracking, which has been very, very eye opening. So I work in 25, I do the Pomodoro 25 minutes on five minute sprint. I also I mean I sprint on things that are not even like necessarily deep work. I think that's what people mostly use Commodores for, but I just work with breaks because I need breaks. And I don't like going too long without breaks. And I found that about 10 hours of my week of my 10 hours worth of Sprint's are actually on shallow work, which I think was a massive eye opener. 

3:42  
And I define shallow work as like the things that I don't even have to use my brain or energy to do. They're somewhat necessary, but they're not like, hard. So for the most part, it's not going to be like client work or writing or product stuff. But like things like responding to emails, filling out forms, or just like little little tax tax sending invoices, just like little little tasks that are important, but like don't require my brainpower and seeing that number of 10 hours a week. I'm excited to continue to see how much I spend in that sphere. I think I was never really thinking about bringing on like a virtual assistant or maybe like yeah, I'm an operations person until lunch bell labs or contracting out some some operations but I think that really really if it's consistent that we'll make the case currently only contract out like some projects and stuff like with design and build but another what went well again started that ship 30 for 30 went poorly. 

4:53  
I feel like this week felt a little uncomfortable. I think that's because I'm starting a few new things where putting myself out there ship 30 for 30 being one of them, the Hey, discomfort means growth. And I'm probably at the stage where I do need to sit down and look at what I'm committing to every day. Because it's becoming more obvious that some things aren't sustainable. Kind of like my like, I have like a daily product sprint. Habit, that is actually not very helpful. I don't think it is really helped me ship more in public, which I think is what I need to reach lunch pail labs current goal. I did some thinking this week of like, you know, ship 30 for 30. Does atomic assays. What might an atomic product be like? What is the product version of writing, where you ship consistently, maybe you build something and you share it like every day. And I still haven't figured that out. And until I figure something like that out, or maybe it's every week, I don't even think that like it's a helpful practice for me. I also unlike just like the lunch pail labs operations side of things, mispriced, a project that we took on for this, like, alleges, just like a quick build for an existing client. And yeah, ended up taking lunch bell labs way longer than it should have. And yeah, so those those kind of kind of bite, but did learn some things about coding moving forward. And also, I think that helped me come to the realization to that, like, I think in the season lunch, pal Labs is not going to really entertain fixed bills, we're going to work with our existing clients. And I think that's it. Honestly, I think we're full until somebody drops off. And I'm so happy for that. Because I freakin love all the people that we like work with on an ongoing basis. But like the quick like, hey, like, can you do this? I don't know if that's even Yeah, kind of like where we want to be in compete moving forward. 

7:15  
And I think those are the the main things. In terms of what I learned this week. Yeah, I'd say the biggest realization is how much time I'm spending like doing shallow, shallow, not that important, but needs to get done work. So either, I need to put up some automations that make that more streamlined, or yeah, maybe there's like, should be an a virtual assistant. 

7:44  
And those are the big things. Looks like looking at some of the quick metrics that I've put together. Looks like things like website visits, newsletter subscribers, you know, followers, all that great stuff. They're up. Again, I don't know if tracking these things are yet yet really correlated with the vision that I'm trying to bring lunch pail labs to but we'll continue to iterate this is the fun part. This is the hard work. So I hope everybody has a wonderful Friday and I will catch you on Monday.