A Project A Month, That’s All We Ask

Remember the old slogan for Blue Diamond Almonds? “A can a week, that’s all we ask.” I do. Since I started my new productivity hack, that’s been running on a loop in my head. If you don’t remember it, I’ve added it at the end of this post.

My productivity hack is holding myself responsible for finishing at least one project a month. I can work on other things, but I can’t just cruise through a month without having anything to show for it.

I got into August, realizing I’d been on this journey for 3 months and had little tangible evidence I did anything. I was finishing tutorials and learning stuff, but I wasn’t making enough stuff. And if you know me, you know my personal mantra is “when in doubt, build.”

That’s why I have two stickies on my desktop.

One is how many days I have left to get good enough at all of this and start making enough money from it to consider it a real business. That deadline is my birthday in 2026. It would be horrible if that birthday my present to myself was admitting defeat, so I figured I needed to get moving on actually sharing more than my gosh darn thoughts.

The second is the schedule of projects through next February.

This month it’s releasing the app I’m building to help me organize the thousands of royalty-free samples I have acquired for music production, ranging from a single drum beat to a 20-second multi-instrument riff to a MIDI file of a chord progression. You can see a bit of the design in the image in the upper left of this post.

There are some apps that do this. I even bought one. The problem is that none of them provide a user experience that maps to how I would want to browse through and categorize the files. So it’s basically just an audio player that can pull in all the files in a folder, let me go through them, assign various properties to them, store those properties in a database, and then search the database based on the properties. The properties are entirely up to me aside from the license and location. The whole idea is that it gets out of the way, lets me get in a groove, and lets me categorize a few hundred samples on a lazy afternoon.

I’m still far from done, but the deadline is for an MVP (minimum viable product)… or MLP (minimum lovable product) if you’re so inclined. I’m using the Neutralino.js framework, which lets me shake the rust off my full-stack web-dev skills. I won’t go deeply into the details on that. I’ll get more into it next month when it’s released for download via a GitHub repository (currently private). Developers will be able to download the code and fix or add features. Regular users will be able to download a binary release that just runs on their computers. It’ll be an early beta, but that’s the goal.

October will see me finish my “Dark Lullabye” song with my melodies and arrangement. I shared a version Suno made last month, so you’ll not only be able to hear how I intended it to sound, but we’ll run a little survey on which version y’all like better… mine or Suno’s.

November is getting a free 30-day trial of the animation software that tops my list to learn and use right now, learning it, and sharing a few short demo videos of my progress with it. If I’m loving it, I’ll be able to buy it on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal (if it has one) before the trial expires.

November through January are all about animation. I’ll also be building out my show bibles for two series of shorts: “Reid Virgo: Space Captain” (the title character) and “NewsHard.news” (yes, I own that domain… it redirects here). As I design the characters, build out the bibles, and write the scripts, I’ll share bits and pieces until the finished videos are ready to premiere. As I gain a following, I might move some “sneak peek” stuff onto a Patreon, but for now the first taste is free. 😊

I debated sharing the beginning of Reid’s theme song that I sang into my voice memos app one day when I was inspired, but it’s a little too rough. I’ll wait until it’s fully written and I’ve fleshed out the melody a bit.

And in the next four months, I’ll be working on other stuff too, but these are the deliverables I have assigned myself. After three months focusing on animation (Nov – Jan), I’ll drop another song by the end of February. These are goals, not promises, but I believe I can hit them. Keep following me to find out.

And now for the promised almond commercial.