Solo work schedule

As someone running a solo business building SaaS products, you can primiarily boil my activities that move the business forward into product and marketing. Product covers coding the actual product as well as infrastructure changes required to sell it. (like integrating a payment provider like Stripe or Paddle into my own account management system) While marketing covers writing blog posts and guides that demonstrate how to use the products as well as documentation, email marketing and social media content.

A popular way to split these tasks among the indie hacker crowd that hangs out on Twitter is to alternate marketing weeks with product weeks. Personally, I have had mixed results with this approach. On the one hand, the one time that I was able to complete a full marketing week, I was very happy with the results. I produced 3 complete blog posts ready to publish along with important copy changes to the product website and social media content for two weeks worth of posts. Undoubtedly, the lack of context switching during this week and knowing this was all I was allowed to work on helps with the discipline to focus on something that can often feel less fun than building product.

The issue is that I was only ever to complete this ideal of a full marketing week one time. Part of the reason I was not able to stick it it consistently is that I have consulting work related to my products that takes up maybe 25% of my time. This work definitely falls into the product bucket as it is mainly tech work. (coding, specs, etc.) So even if I told myself that I would spend the other 75% of my time working on my own marketing, that context switch was enough to make the whole process much less successful.

As a result, I'm currently experimenting with a timeblock schedule, where I have daily blocks for content, client work and the remainder goes to product. It's too early to say yet if it is something that I will stick to, but I'm encouraged by the results so far.