Previous State of the Unions: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020

Welcome back. A new year of course means a new Favorites, and it also means a new State of the Union. Apparently people call these things “Annual Reviews” now? That name feels a little less inspired, so I’m going to keep with the traditional title scheme.

The format should be pretty obvious by this point, but I’ll summarize: in State of the Union, I go over my annual plans for my projects in a full scope, organized as 1) a recap of last year’s plans, and 2) a breakdown of this year’s. Let’s get to it.

Recap

In previous years, I’ve focused on numbers a lot more than just getting shit done. This year, that’s going to switch. It’s not that I stopped caring about analyzing KPIs, it’s just that it’s now become a backend monthly process and (perhaps more importantly) the numbers are really boring to talk about. Because of that, this recap section is going to be a lot smaller than usual.

The things I’ll note here are that the Medium has been sunsetted (kinda shitty reach and infrastructure compared to a unique page) and the podcasts have been cancelled… for now. They’ll actually be coming back, perhaps later in the year. Unfortunately I had to delete most of them because of some, uh, distasteful things I said in my younger years. So while I still want to hit 100 podcast episodes, we’ll now be doing that starting from an episode 1.

astukari

It’s hard to believe that we just started the newsletter last year. Growth has been pretty good here, and I’m continuously trying out new experiments. I also hope to bring back the Youtube channel, not just with the podcast idea I mentioned above but also with video “summaries” of old blog posts (once again, a big trend going around here). Other than that I think astukari is pretty stable as it is.

Shanah

Shanah has been going through a lot of flux as to figure out the most optimal way of fulfilling the product. You can learn more about the project here. Lord knows that’s going to be the number one focus on Shanah for now, getting a good value product set up but also automating it so that I’m not spending 120 hours a week juggling a bunch of mindless operations tasks.

Apalla

With the release of Apalla Alexandria, things are looking up here. I’m hoping to set up a homebase that isn’t just a Substack page (a unique website like this and Shanah?) and continue building out the product here. As Shanah matures somewhat, I think a solid focus will come to Apalla.

Robinson Books

I’m thinking of (attempting to) write 2 books, release 2 books, each year from here on out. Obviously, that is a very theoretical concept speaking that I just now started this. This number may go up or down depending on how actually difficult it is to do what I just described. I also hope to build out the publishing architecture of Robinson Books and allow a more unified structure.

Other Stuff

I don’t want to promise too much else, because as many will likely point out this is already a lot for one person. So I think if the theme of 2020 was winding up, this one is winding back down. Perhaps there will be a pattern of expansion and contraction from these years on out. In the wise words of Saint-Exupery:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”