Reflecting on 90 days of The Daily 5.

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] This episode is probably going to be longer than five minutes, just so you know. When I first began this podcast, I was in a place where I hadn't truly shipped anything in a while, and I felt out of practice. I was also in a place where I was thinking really hard about my productivity systems and my environment, doing what I could to create a place conducive to creating.

[00:00:48] In these last 90 days, I've successfully shipped a five minute podcast episode every single day. I've created and coded things at work, handled team conflict, drafted and built processes, successfully shipped nine episodes and a trailer with my co-host for my tech podcast. I started a project that has been brewing in my mind for nearly a year and has now captured my imagination and made seriously solid progress on my mini course after being apprehensive and procrastinating for many, many months.

[00:01:29] I also redesigned my website, although I haven't gotten around to coding it yet, made massive improvements to my home office, which has made me really happy, figured out a way to balance working intensely with my social and personal life [reasonably]. Held a week long birthday celebration for my spouse. Learned to uphold and honor work-related boundaries better than ever, while still accepting and knowing that once in a while I would have to overstep them.

[00:02:02] And I have thought really, really hard about the future I want.

[00:02:09] Nothing is perfect. No one is perfect, and I have daily struggles balancing everything I want. I mean, I literally spent all of yesterday sleeping – I was that tired. I slept at night. I slept at my in-laws, sitting up straight on a couch. I slept in the car, I slept on my own sofa. I slept at my mom's. And then when I came home, I fell asleep nearly right away and straight through the night until I woke up for suhoor – the meal we have before we start fasting.

[00:02:38] But it's been a long time since I was this clear about what I want to do, where I want my life to go, and how I wanna get there. In fact, my sister-in-law and I had a very, very long conversation about a bit of the "how" yesterday, and while I'm sure I could have arrived at the thinking and plans all on my own, I do know that being forced to ship this podcast every single day for 90 days played a very big role in accelerating my thinking.

[00:03:17] I was forced to confront myself every single day and think about...what kind of value I could provide on a daily basis. If you followed along for many of those days, you'll know that some days I had something interesting to say. Some days I had something I was passionate about. Many days were unfinished thoughts because there's only so much I can fit into five minutes and other days I struggled to communicate something of value. But every single day I shipped – mostly I was able to ship on time.

[00:03:51] For the time that I set myself, although not every day, and my schedule has changed in Ramadan for sure, and for the past few days, I have been recording on the same day as the episode is published instead of the night before. But despite that change, I have recorded almost every single day and shipped every.single.day.

[00:04:15] There has only been one day in this entire 90 days where I missed a day of recording. But I still published because I had an episode in the bank. This podcast has been an exercise in persistence and in showing up day after day, even when every day is not great. It's also been..proof of intrinsic motivation.

[00:04:41] While I do occasionally link to the day's episode on social media, I don't do it always, and most people don't even know I have this podcast. It doesn't have a particularly big audience, although it has an audience larger than I thought it ever would, and I enjoy the DM's and occasional public messages I get about an episode when it resonates.

[00:05:05] So despite not having big numbers, I proved to myself that I am in fact capable of creating and persisting just for myself, which for a long time I was worried I had lost the ability to do. So I think on the outside it may not feel like a lot has changed, but for me it has changed a lot of things internally.

[00:05:28] And last night I was sitting at the table having iftar – the meal we have when we break our fast at sunset – when I had almost kind of an epiphany and everything I had been thinking and considering came together into one solid picture.

So I know that I've said out loud that my goal is to do 365 episodes of this podcast, but I'm making the executive decision to change that goal. Because the real goal? The real goal was to practice shipping and to figure out what the heck I wanted, what I really wanted – and not just some vague, hazy, lofty goal about what I wanted, and that goal?

[00:06:17] Of figuring out what I want and shipping? That has been achieved. I thought it would take a year, but turns out when you're thinking this damn hard about it all the time, every single day and dragging yourself out of bed in the middle of the night sometimes to ship an episode, things...accelerate a little bit.

[00:06:43] So we're going to do 100 episodes. Because I like a nice round number. This is the 91st episode, and so there will be nine more. Nine more episodes that I've already kind of sketched out in my mind. And then this podcast will stay live and available for anyone who might discover it, but there won't be any more new episode[s].

[00:07:09] So that is the news.

[00:07:17] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.