2016 is going to be a big year. There’s a couple of reasons why I believe that — I’ll lay them out in a minute — but the number one reason has to be because I’ll be working as my own boss for at least an entire year. That means I’m in control of my own success, and thus responsible for it. So it’ll be very important for me to get the most out of my time. Therefore I decided to create this blog and track my progress publicly.
Although I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll be monitoring exactly, I have decided upon a couple of main topics on which I’ll be focusing regularly. The first one being money. In 2015 I resigned from my full-time job at Ziggo, set up my own company and started working as a freelancer for the startup Floown. Naturally this has brought about changes in my financial situation.
Where in the last two years I had the certainty of receiving the same amount of income each month, no matter my efforts, this time around it’s for a large part up to myself. I take that as a negative as well as positive. It opens the door up for me to earn more money than I have ever earned before, but it also puts me in the potential position of not having any work at all. That could become a serious issue, especially since my monthly costs have increased substantially since 2015 (rent, bills, taxes, etc.).
Still, I’m quite positive. I joined Floown because they believe in the future of work. A future where people increasingly start working as independent contractors in control of their own time and energy. With the technological advancements of today it almost seems inevitable that regular full-time jobs will become a rarity. Most jobs will fragment into smaller tasks, and most companies can’t take the burden of a house full of permanent contracts. Floown is actively seeking to build solutions for that new future, and I’m happy to be part of that.
Food & Design
Another topic that deserves a prominent position on my blog is food. Over the past six months I have posted a bundle of pictures on Instagram of the food that I cook. By popular demand I’m sharing more behind the scenes stuff with regards to the ingredients and methods I use, the food that I like from restaurants and more of those things. I’m still working out how to approach this exactly, but I have a few ideas.
The third main topic is design. I’m using the term quite broadly here, because for me it means design in the professional sense; the things I’m working on at Floown (web design, a bit of programming, marketing), but it also means design in the personal sense; the clothes I like, interior stuff I like, whatever. I can at least tell that soon I’ll post a bit about the design of this very site. Not that it’s so groundbreaking, but for me it was an interesting experience.
Finally, there’ll be a lot of music. I’m not sure yet in what capacity, but I’ll probably start out with a few playlists and take it from there. Hopefully I’ll also be able to buy a lot of records and share those experiences on here.
Tracking, Tracking
And of course since it’s a blog, I’ll also be journalling about my travels, interesting events, and anything else that might be of interest. I’m curious myself to see how this thing develops. One of the things I regret from 2015 is that I didn’t make enough photos, videos and journals. A lot of things happened, but I often have trouble remembering what exactly. Hopefully this blog will serve as a nice journal at the end of 2016.
In terms of actual data I’ll be tracking, I’ll be writing another post in a bit. I’m currently in the process of setting up a few apps that will help me make it easy. I’ll probably take this month to find out what works and what doesn’t work, so I can start doing the actual measuring from February on.