Less building this week, more writing, recording and planning

If you caught update #9, you know where this picks up. And the short version for this week is: less building, more writing, recording, and planning.

After sitting with that last update for a day, I realized my focus for the rest of August needs to shift. More writing, more planning, and I want to start recording stories for English B1 to B2 learners while I finalize the Echo Room plan.

This post covers some of that at a surface level. One part deserves its own post, so I'm keeping it vague here on purpose. This post is more for personal reference, and I treat it as a mental note.

Why I'm building less

I think it's okay to build less right now. I'm genuinely worried about builder's burnout, and I've learned that stepping back from coding, from building, from shipping shit non-stop, is sometimes more useful than squeezing every last percent out of my Claude subscription.

Part of me wants to keep going, to fuck around with the native Mac app I'm building for my flagship SaaS. The other part knows that if I keep chasing that, I lose momentum on everything else that matters right now. That second part won, at least for this week.

There's often a lightbulb that shows up when you stop building for a bit. When I'm heads-down in code every day, I stop noticing what the site or app needs, what kind of content is missing, whether the plan still makes sense.

Taking distance gives that perspective back. It's not about me being lazy. I know myself better than anyone. It's about not mistaking momentum for progress.

The plan for September

I was ahead of schedule this month. I jotted it down in my update #8, and there's no better way to stay ahead than to just focus on what I'm supposed to be doing. For September, that's four things:

• Blog content for my SaaS, the priority

• The BETA invite for my SaaS

• Preparing Echo Room

• A game plan for Study & Story Brew, which gets its own post later

What changes in my routine?

Starting around mid-September, roughly 20 percent of my time goes to a microphone: recording story batches and podcast content. That's a real workflow shift from the last few months.

Read also: The Workflow Changed. The Routine Had to Follow.

It means I need to plan and pre-write a lot of content now, for TWO's blog, for Indie Hacker Blog, and for my life-in-Taiwan posts. All manageable, all things I was already planning to do. I'm not in a rush to acquire customers. A few weeks ago I had no marketing plan for any of this. Now I do.

Finding my voice for TWO

I recently started writing content for my SaaS, and after four articles, I'm finally getting closer to my real tone of voice. That took freakin' longer than expected. Even calling it warm-up content, it was still a hurdle to get over.

But those four pieces are already giving me more ideas than I can keep up with, within the same categories, and that's turning into a snowball.

I want to publish at least two articles a week from here, and maybe scale up once the site's properly warmed up.

Planning was the easy part (kinda). Now it's blogging consistently and doing the SEO work that gets TWO found, so I can build credibility, topical authority, and organically acquire subscribers.

Beta users before more building

Somewhere in that same window, I need to build a landing page for the BETA invite and figure out how to bring in BETA users who get lifetime access at no cost.

Even with AI assistance, I suck at sales copy, so this might be even harder than the entire native Mac app build for me.

While I was thinking that through, it clicked that I shouldn't build anything else until I get feedback. That includes the native Mac app.

If it turns up critical errors, I'd end up pouring my focus into fixing an app that might not even be ready for a public BETA yet. Better to know that before I sink more time in, not after.

Building less, in this case, plays entirely in my favor.

What I think I can get done (hopefully)

I've got dozens of topics lined up across the blogs I run. Counting the ad hoc pieces I'll write along the way for here, I think I can manage three blog posts a day.

That gives me a healthy buffer for TWO's blog, plus enough for Indie Hacker Blog that I can publish there once a week. On top of that, some Pinterest planning, and probably expanding how I distribute all of it across social.

I also have to factor in the chance that BETA users might show up. If they do, I need to be fucking ready to execute and communicate, not buried in a backlog.

So everything else has to stay low-friction, low-cognitive-load. Nothing that eats the mental bandwidth I'll need if that happens.

Realistically, my whole week comes down to recording and planning stories, writing blog posts, planning social content, and expanding on all of it as I go.

Where that leaves me

Less shipping, more writing. That's the plan, not something I'm telling myself to feel better about not coding. I built a lot these past few months. Now the content has to catch up, and that only happens if I sit down and write it, not if I keep adding features nobody's fucking asked for yet.

September is when this either works or it doesn't. Either way, I'll know more than I do right now, and that's enough to keep going.