Sticking to just 3 new habits helped me launch my SaaS

The story of any indie hacker starts with at least a couple of failed projects. Mine is not an exception.

My name is Slava, and I would like to share one of my failures. How it brought me to the world of productivity and habits, and share a couple of habits that I found the most helpful when building my SaaS - My Good Week.

Failure to complete MVP

Two years ago, I decided to pursue entrepreneurship and was excited to start my first project. Living in Japan, I had an idea of a service that would allow users to keep a diary of hot springs (onsens) they have visited and share it with their friends. I assumed that I would finish Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within two months. I was wrong.

As you might have guessed, I vastly underestimated the time it would take me to complete this project. Three months had passed, and I still had a lot of tasks yet to complete. Non-development tasks like data entry about each hot spring took a lot of time. I avoided it for days and weeks, finding more and more technical features to implement instead.

Habits > Willpower

After more than half of a year, I had to admit that I would not finish the project. I decided to stop and try to understand what I did wrong? I could not find any part of work that I was not qualified to do or any tasks that would not be possible to complete within this half a year. It must be about the way I approached these tasks.

I went through dozens of productivity and entrepreneurship books and tried various approaches. The first thing that I found was that my reliance on willpower was a big problem. Willpower is a limited resource, and every time we push ourselves to start doing something, we spend it. Harder, we have to push ourselves, more of willpower we spend. Next thing you know, you are stuck in front of a screen, watching some Netflix series - no willpower left.

Soon I found that building a set of habits can help me start working on my project regularly and stress-free. My two books of choice for habit building are "The Power of Habit" and "Atomic Habits". Instead of paraphrasing these books, I will introduce specific practices and habits I found helpful for working on my product.

Use calendar to build habits

A key to building a habit is a so-called "cue". It can be anything, a place, some object you see, or just another action. When the cue appears, you start doing your desired activity. For obvious habits, like brushing your teeth, it is easy to define a cue - for example, finished drinking coffee. But what about habits that move your project toward completion? Here I found calendar planning to be a helpful tool. Here are several hints on using a calendar as a habit cue.

Hint 1. Use multiple calendars

You are probably already using your calendar for event planning or remembering birthdays. You want to have separate coloring and notification settings for each of your calendars. Using one calendar for everything will make it hard to separate your daily life, work, and side-projects.

Hint 2. Set up notifications

Here is your cue. Any calendar service today can send you push notifications. Do set it up only for those calendars you use for habit building. Having notification for any insignificant event will make the cue unclear and slow down your habit-building process.

Hint 3. Have a clear event title and description

When you get a notification, you should know what activity you should start and have everything ready to start immediately. Without a clear definition, the activity cannot become automatic, and in many cases, you will find yourself avoiding it.

Core habits to stick to

I will introduce several core habits that I believe can become a foundation for turning any repetitive activity into a habit.

Habit 1. Adjusting past calendar events

The calendar is not only about planning. It also lets you look back and understand how much work exactly you put in and make some changes. Many calendar users skip it, but it is essential for weekly review and planning (see the following habits).

The cue for this habit is the end of another activity. For example, you just finished writing a weekly blog post. You should go back to the calendar and ensure the timing you assigned for this task is correct. Or let's say you spent only 10 minutes on the blog post and now have to stop unexpectedly. Fix the calendar event and plan another one later.

It will become automatic after doing it for a week and will not take you more than a minute each time.

Habit 2. Weekly review

The weekly review is recommended in most productivity methodologies and for a reason. If done right, it will help you with:

• Confirming that you did all you have planned. It will serve as a "reward" part of a habit, the last part of the habit-building process that reinforces habit by giving you a bit of dopamine boost.
• Finding activities that you skipped or did not fully complete. Were you busy with other activities, or were the task not clearly defined, which caused you to procrastinate? Having accurate information about the past week can help you understand the reason.

Set up a calendar event for the weekly review. It can be a recurring event if you know you have a free time slot available, or you can set up a new calendar event each week.

How to do Weekly Review?

Here I would like to mention the SaaS that I have just launched - My Good Week. It might be hard to get a clear picture of each of your activities from Google Calendar. My Good Week will visualize each activity and provide statistics necessary for weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews.

If you want to try this approach, go to mygoodweek.com and link your Google Calendar in a couple of simple steps. Then just create an activity by choosing a calendar and a filter for events by name, description, or location. You will instantly get statistics about your activity with no additional data entry. It will keep updating in real-time, so you can come back and check your results next week.

Go through each activity you have planned:

1. Confirm that all activity events are the same as what happened in reality and fix inconsistencies.
2. Compare the number of times or hours you spent on each activity with your plan. For activities that did not go as planned, think of the reasons.

Habit 3. Weekly planning

Typically weekly planning is done right after the weekly review is finished. The goal here is to use the insights you got from the review and adjust your plan for the next week.

For activities with recurring calendar events, ensure that they do not conflict with anything next week. For example, if you have a birthday party or a trip, move your recurring events.

For activities without events planned, create events for the next week.
If there were some unmet plans last week, consider reducing the number of events, choosing another time, or defining activity more clearly.

Turn your work on a product into a set of habits

The three habits above make up a foundation for habit building, but how to employ it to work on your project? Any project at any stage can be split into many repetitive activities. Here are a couple of examples:

• Development: daily development sessions, weekly testing of main functionality, etc.
• Analytics: weekly metrics checking, monthly report publishing, etc.
• Content generation: writing tweets daily, writing blog posts weekly, adding new plugins to a plugins catalog, etc.
• Sales and customer relations: answering client emails, having weekly calls, consulting sessions, participating in events, etc.

You can come up with any number of activities that you consider essential for your project at the moment.

Obviously, not every time you sped the planned hour working on a new feature will bring desirable results. Building habits is not about getting the best output every single day. It is about showing up every day and getting to work. This brings actual results in the long run, much better than an all-nighter or weekend marathon.

Summary

I hope this methodology will help you get back on track and grow your project more effectively. It does not require any tooling other than Google Calendar. Still, I hope you will find My Good Week a helpful companion in your habit-building journey.

If you would like to learn more about productivity, habit-building, and how it applies to entrepreneurship, please consider signing up for the newsletter: https://newsletter.mygoodweek.com.