By Cathy Sarisky, Ghost Expert in From Cathy's desk — Jan 6, 2026

New year, new thoughts

Some reflections on the end of my first full calendar year of freelancing full time, and my goals for 2026.

Happy New Year!

January '26 marks 3.5 years since I spun up my first Ghost site, and about 1.5 years since I quit my academic job to do Ghost-adjacent work full time. As my first calendar year of Spectral Web Services being my full time job comes to a close, here's where my mind is, and my goals for 2026.

Goals for 2026

Less overscheduling

I need to not overschedule myself. It doesn't make me happier. One of the best things I did in 2025 was to recognize that I didn't consistently have 40 bookable hours in a week. I am currently doing too much kid shuttling and family labor. An occasional “nothing to do” day would be a feature, not a bug.

Fix the tech stack / retainer plan rejigger

You can read more about the changes in this other post.

Hourly work rocks

I switched from project-based to hourly pricing mid year, and it's been great. I'm staying all-hourly in 2026. A big shout-out to Phil Simon for encouraging me to go that route.

Less uncompensated labor

I love helping users on the Ghost forum, and unanswered questions deeply offend me. And I love getting to contribute to making Ghost better. What a super cool opportunity!

And yet... it's a distraction from paid work, and it doesn't help cover two kids worth of tuition bills, nor provide health insurance, nor even get the laundry folded.

This is ridiculous. How did I spend 21 days x 24 hours reading the forum? If I'd spent that doing client work, I'd have covered a whole year of tuition -- for both kids!

So the goal for 2026 is to use business hours only for work that is funded. If there's something unpaid that I'm dying to work on, great, but it needs to go in my time budget for fun, not work.

Say it with me: Funded or fun. Fun or funded.

❤️

Let me take a moment here to thank Magic Pages and Synaps Media, who are Github monthly sponsors, and 404media, who paid me to build the enhanced editor role that allows editors to do member management. Thank you for your support!

If you'd like to fund me to contribute to Ghost or to build an open-source tool, let's talk!

Build all the things

I have too many half-done projects that keep getting pre-empted by other work. Some of them are cool ideas I'd like to have time for, and some are possibly profitable. (There might even be some overlap between the two categories.) In 2025, I didn't have much time for building anything that didn't immediately have a client attached to it. For 2026, I'm going to reserve more time to build my own projects. First up (er... after the dashboard) is an Apple News/Ghost integration. Expect lots of complaining later this month about how Ghost has too many cards, as I've got to work out how to individually translate each one into Apple News format.

What I'm looking forward to

Tiny News Collective has me reserved for nearly half my target hours for 2026, doing Ghost onboarding, training, support, theme customization, and more. It scratches my itch to be helpful, I'm strengthening local journalism, and I get paid to do it. That's a win. Working with TNC staff and publishers was some of the most consistently rewarding work I did in 2025, so I'm super excited for more in 2026.

If you know another mission-focused organization that might want a fractional Ghost developer, I'd love to pick up another client organization with regular needs in the range of 10-40 hours per month. Send them my way!