100 Days of Twogging

100 days ago I embarked on something new. I finished my contract and went full-time on our startup. The timing wasn’t mine, it was down to the contract I was working on coming to an end, but the timing was in fact quite good. Mike and I were trying to get our startup off the ground and I also had a bit of upcoming surgery (see day 22).

When I shifted from nights and weekends to a mixture of days, nights and weekends, I decided to start a new habit, daily tweetlogging (or twogging for short).

It was for many reasons, accountability, reflection and hopefully insights for those that followed along. It was also shamelessly stolen from serial maker Seth Louey:

Now, 100 days in, I thought it a good time to take a quick look back at how the first 100 days have gone and share what I’ve learnt so far.

Days 1–7 ~ Cold emails + conversations 🗣

Days 8–17 ~ Initial build ⚒

Days 18–20 ~ Faro 🇵🇹

Day 21 ~ Surprise! 🎉

Days 22–27 ~ Surgery 😷

Days 28–36 ~ Recovery, slow progress + onboarding 📈

Days 37–42 ~ Email dev ✉️

Days 43–45 ~ Onboarding 👋 + bugs 🐜

Days 46–49 ~ Friends ❤️

Days 50–52 ~ France 🇫🇷

Days 53–58 ~ Back to work 💼

Day 59 ~ Day off 🔙🔜

Day 60 ~ London 🇬🇧❤️

Days 61–65 ~ Tick ’em off ✅

Day 66 ~ See Day 59 👀

Days 67–72 ~ Tick tick boom ✅

Day 73 ~ See Day 66 👀

Days 74–79 ~ Tickety boo ✅

Day 80 ~ See Day 73 👀

Days 81–86 ~ Step by step 👟

Day 87 ~ London 🇬🇧 + steak w/ friend 🍖

Days 88–89 ~ Stickin’ with the tickin’ ✅

Day 90 ~ Old friends 👥

Days 91–92 ~ A few more ticks ✅

Days 93–100 ~ Greece 🇬🇷 + wine 🍷 + a little work ✅

What I’ve learnt 🤔

Time flies ⏰💨

I look back over some of the things in my twogs and it feels like it was only last week, when it’s been over a month. Logging what I’m up to each day has helped me appreciate the scarcity of time and making the most of what I’ve got whilst I can.

Similarly to how vlogging preserves a moment in time that can be revisited at any point in the future, twogging does in its own small sense. It’s a mini time capsule for future reminiscing.

A friend of mine once told me that when you look back on life you won’t remember the mundane, routine day to day. You’ll remember the highlights and the memories made. I try to incorporate that into my life and remember to break out of the day to day work with experiences I’ll remember. I don’t know how long I have on this planet, so I want to make the most of it.

People like reality 🤓

I wasn’t sure how popular the tweetlog would be, but so far it seems to be fairly well received. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, nothing of any interest is, but so far 63 folks have liked the kick off tweet and the rest seem to have gone down well. Since then Mubashar has launched tweetchains and Benjamin Alijagić worked on something similar.

Share what you can 💁‍

I’ve learnt so much from the honesty and transparency of others far more successful than me, and the openness of the community is one of my favourite parts of tech. People share far more than they need to and as a result I feel I have a greater sense of intimacy with these folks.

I love how AJ has been building Carrd in public, how Nathan shares about the bad times not just the good and how Joel and the Buffer team share pretty much everything.

In my experience so far, being transparent has more to offer than it could take away. We’re not as radically committed to transparency as some, but we endeavour to share what we can.

Life is not a snapshot 📸

Please note, this is just my daily highlights, this is not fully representative of life. If somehow things look like they were easy, always good or productive, it didn’t feel like that on the inside. There were some hard times, some great times and quite a lot of unproductive times. I’m still working to decrease the first and last and increase the middle.

Here’s to the next 100 🍻

I’m not sure what the next 100 days will entail, but from launching our first SaaS (UserCompass) to some more travel, I’m excited to make the most of it. Feel free to follow along for the journey with me.

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