Let Live

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There's this project that I run, called Produktywny Uczeń. It's a productivity website, for students, in Polish. To my knowledge, a first of its kind.

While it still is just a "side project", it made me spend a lot of time on it. Getting things running from the ground up, just by yourself, is not easy. While I have developed and streamlined particular workflows, the amount of work required to keep up with the upload and maintenance schedule is significant.

The last piece of content I published was on June 15th. Then I announced a two-month-long break with the intention of going back in September.

But I didn't go back to the schedule. All through September, and through most of October, the project was left untouched, with barely any work being done. Only in the past two weeks I started to work back on it, with the next piece of content scheduled to release tomorrow.

All throughout this break, but mostly in the past six weeks, I worried about not doing enough. About not posting new content, planning new events, promoting the project. I felt like not keeping up was invalidating all the past work I've done; almost as if all of it was worth nothing, if new things weren't constantly added.

To my complete surprise, the past month has been the best for the project, in terms of numbers. I've been getting plenty of visitors to the website, many new listeners and followers of the podcast, more subscribers to the newsletter. I tripled my podcast followers on Spotify between Sept 1st and now, and the project has been running since September 1st 2019. It's been performing very well, all while I was leaving it alone. I wasn't promoting it, sharing any links to it. All of this was natural traffic, natural growth. Sure, it coincided with the beginning of the new academic year, but I didn't promote it a single bit.

All of this tells me, or rather, reminds me, that leaving things alone is a mighty force. Keeping them under constant control will do two things: obstruct their own, natural rhythm, and leave you burned out. Plenty of effort but little results.

Leave them alone, let them go. Don't obstruct, don't project.

Live and let live.