Rebooting - Picking myself out of a slump!

So my city went back in to a lockdown due to the pandemic and I think this time it is more difficult than it was in 2020. We are all dealing with a lot collectively and on top of it we have our own problems in every person’s life and in my life, I happen to be the root cause of 50% of those problems.

How this affects me

Baclinc has been doing okay but not good and not at all great since the start of this year and it is really becoming more and more difficult for me and my partner to deal with this now. This new wave of the pandemic came all of a sudden with full force in my city of Mumbai and weren’t prepared for this to say the least. Everything that could go wrong, did.

• We moved to a bigger office space that I had been dreaming of for the past 9-10 months and as soon as we moved within the next 7 days the city shutdown. Not only that is sad that I don’t get to use that space but we have now incurred an additional cost of the security deposit as well as increase in rent due to the bigger space. All for nothing.

• Our team size reduced and remote work is a nightmare and nothing is getting done.

• We are in a serious cash crunch, our clients aren’t paying and that breaks our chain of bills and for us to pay it forward.

• We let go off a big client the last month because they were too toxic and didn’t give us the best work experience. Again, taking a financial hit.

• We’ve landed us in a financial nightmare at this point with a number of people to pay.

• In dire times we had to liquidate our crypto portfolio missing on some huge returns. Huge huge losses there.

What Am I Up to?

At the start of this, about 10 days back I was determined and wanted to change it all but as it got tougher I just said, F*ck This!!

I was burning out for the past 6 months or so with no rest, constant stress, losing hair, calls, meetings, arguments, discussions and taking some toll on my personality. I ended up not really loving what I do, and this is my passion. I built this company with my partner out of college this is everything I ever wanted but the stress made the experience pretty pathetic to say the least.

I started to chill a little and running away from all the work I had, giving random excuses to clients for the delayed work and completely losing my grip.

Now I am not able get back there and it is absolutely important for me to work my ass off right now without wasting any time.

I’m a practitioner of stoicism and I am going against one of the quotes that I live by and probably the biggest stoic takeaway,

“We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”- Seneca

The ‘Slump‘

I’m wasting my time watching random videos about history, world wars, some travel vlogs about the Himalayas listening to podcasts about dictators learning about Stalin, Hitler and the big boy Kim J and I absolutely loveeee all of this.

On top of which I have to mention my messed up sleep cycle, I am sleeping at 8am in the morning, wake up at 11am and take client calls, sleep at 1pm again, wake up at 5pm and survive the rest of the day feeling tired and feeling lethargic physically.

Feeling as much comfortable as I can but also hating my situation at the same time, feeling relaxed physically and stressed, hating myself mentally.

I usually start my day following a system, a to-do list, a calendar, journaling, planning my day out and following my process oriented workflow followed by an evening essay about the day in my journal and sometimes I review my day at the end comparing it to my morning plan but for sure tweeting out my daily progress on my ‘Public Journal twitter account’ BUT, I have completely lost touch with all of these and I am just taking the day as it comes with no plan and not getting much done.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am working but only doing the work that is absolutely necessary to do like delivering client results. I also cold emailed 70 businesses to get in new clients but not a lot of it is working out for me.

The Reset

I started this Substack blog a few days back with the goal that I want to develop a writing habit and I already am kind of in the zone where I’m comfortable writing everyday as I journal and document my day extensively everyday. I decided for myself that I will try to write a blog post here, every single day. (Or at least 4 times a week since my work doesn’t leave me with much time for myself)

Here are the things that i’m going to do to break out of this slump and get back to living my ever productive, satisfying life that I dream of which will put me on the map.

• No Youtube, No vlogs, I will try to be more mindful of the food that i’m eating that I would generally swallow looking at the screen so, switching to biz/startup/philosophy podcasts so I can look at my food and eat it. Also at the same time I learn about something cool instead of looking at other people’s lives.

• Drink lots and lots of water.

• Work on ‘Environment design‘ on my desk and inside my screen, clean my mac and make the process of working easier and frictionless, removing unnecessary pages from my Notion and not having 30 tabs open at once.

• Read a book, I f*ckin hate this but It seems as if I don’t read the world will stop moving and it will not let me be an entrepreneur. I have a very short attention span and I’d describe myself as somewhat like a butterfly who keeps hoping from flower to flower and can’t stay still BUT, to develop some focus and calm myself a little bit, I’m gonna read books. // I do read but summaries and consume audiobooks and videos about the topic and hate reading physical books but let’s fight that.

• Get back to the system. Follow my todo list and dashboard and go through every work flow i’ve made for myself.

• And of course, Write everyday (Or create some kind of content everyday)

What am I working on?

• Working with the tech team for development and working on the product side of our upcoming product/Startup Postbing 

• We’re trying to launch our very own Venture Capital firm so active work on that.

• Building a side SAAS project within the DM space, have to finish it and launch as soon as possible.

• Get new clients for Baclinc.

• Create as much content as I can for the Baclinc brand.

• Rank our in-house SEO sites.

• Deliver results to our clients.

I hope I get all of this done, I’m going through bad and tough times and I’m aware that this is a phase. I will one day comeback to this post to laugh at this.

Cheers!

- Abhishek // @abhinemm