A bit of a late start, but welcome 2024! This would typically be the time I set new intentions and goals for the new year, but this year we are going to do something a little different.

For me, this is the year of rest. I have finally gotten diagnosed with Long Covid after dealing with the condition since June of 2022 and there is no real cure besides resting myself back to health, both mentally and physically. That means I can’t push myself to achieve the most I can, set my outrageous goals, publish everything and do all the things on top of a full time job. It means I have to take it easy.

It means I have to learn how to take a break.

And that sucks.

But it’s also been a long time coming. As much as I wish it didn’t take a major illness to do, it really was only a matter of time before I was going to burn right out and be forced into some kind of break anyway.

I am still myself, though, and that doesn’t mean I am going to completely stop everything. It just means adjusting what I’m doing so that I am not incurring major setbacks or triggering crashes.

And so, I have a few promises to myself in terms of this blog for this year:

1. I will allow myself to take days or weeks on a post and not try to stick to a schedule
2. I will continue to review books and post date those for Fridays, but will also be comfortable about missing weeks if I just cannot keep the brain together enough to read
3. I will talk more about the things happening in my life
4. I will also talk about the things I am working on, even if “working on” doesn’t result in anything tangible
5. I won’t stick to any themes or topics, and am free to talk about things outside of writing or jewelry or anything else

As it is, this blog took me 3 days to write, and it’s not even that long! Be proud of me. I’m already trying and hopefully this is a good step on the long road to recovery.

I have been publishing since 2012, putting out several books a year for a decade, and took the last year off of publishing. At first, that was an intentional choice. The actual plan was to use the year to try out a few stories that I wasn’t sure about and give myself the space to not like something and still have something that I could get ready for publication the year after.

That plan fell apart pretty much immediately. Between the flood and getting sick with a chronic condition that I have not yet recovered from (I might one day, but it’s going to take a while) I have had to learn a lot about rest and figure out how I can still consider myself an author when I am not writing. Or when I am incapable of writing.

The thing I’ve come to realize in my time of forced rest is that the way I was going before, with time spent working almost every evening on writing the next book and making sure I was always busy with another new project, was probably not sustainable in the long term. I have needed the rest for a while, and finally circumstances allowed me to take it.

And rest has been hard. It’s not something that comes naturally to me by any means. I want to do things constantly, but this rest and the new habits that I’m building as a part of it are good for me in the long term, regardless of health. Spending hours on the computer churning out 5000-10000 words in a day in order to meet deadlines may mean that the stories get done faster, but ultimately that rate is not good for me.

I had my productive decade. And now I am entering an era of rest. Expect books much more slowly, as I try and find a new balance with where I’m at now.

I have been trying to read more widely over the last couple years in an attempt to better myself, which has mostly meant that I’m reading a lot of books available at my library. Which, for some reason, has been a lot of self improvement books.

Well. I wanted to improve myself.

Thing is that I don’t really like a lot of them. The advice is very narrowly tailored to a specific audience without any consideration to intersectionality of any kind ((Such as maybe someone is not in complete control of their time)) and the most popular ones seem to have the ongoing trend of insisting that their methodology is the only one that works and that everyone else is living their life incorrectly. The studies cited don’t take into account the fuller context of what was going on, or they just eliminate the failures from the narrative entirely, if they don’t say that those failures were not doing it right.

But that’s not to say that they are all actually terrible. And I have not been putting them down, but making it through to hear them out. Which means I think I’ve figured out basically how I’m supposed to read these books now.

Understand the problem they are solving

At the start of these books is usually a thesis statement of some sort. There is a problem in your life and this book is just the tool you need to solve it.

Most people’s lives are not comprised of just one issue that needs to be resolved, though, so it’s important to get an understanding of precisely what one issue they are looking at discussing in the book. You are overwhelmed with tasks to do. You are uncertain what to do with your career. You don’t have enough money. Solving one of these issues won’t solve your whole life, but it will provide you with some insight into what some of the causes of that problem might be.

The descriptive factors of these books are usually pretty good

Over the course of many of these books, they will bring up more specific elements of the problem they are trying to solve. This is usually paired with a description of the problem and some of the underlying causes of it. I have found that, in most cases, these are pretty good insights.

The solutions are a suggestion

The place where I am constantly falling off on these books is the prescriptive parts where they talk about what the solution for the problem is. This is almost always where the lack of understanding of how people actually work come into play.

Many of these books will offer the one thing that will fix the problem they are describing. This is the way they have personally found to have worked. Often, these are worth at least trying if you have not already tried it out, just to see if it is compatible with the way you live your life. But it will usually not actually be the only way and you may need to modify it to make it better suit your situation.

It sells better if they give you a solution

One of my biggest issues with this whole genre is that the problems are what I relate to, but the solution is just not something that works either for the way my life is structured or my situation, but I am constantly reminding myself that this is the selling point.

In many cases, these books are written for the person who is running out of options, who have already tried as much as they can to resolve the issue on their own, and who are just looking for answers that they have not been able to find on their own. Having something relatively authoritative describing the thing you are dealing with and handing you a solution is going to resonate a lot better than the books that give a structure of how to solve the problem for yourself.

Take the intent and modify

I’ve found the most useful elements of the solutions offered in these kinds of books to be something where the core of the solution comes from a place of resolving the issue and figuring out how to make it work best for me.

I didn’t particularly like Getting Things Done, but I like the practice of dumping all of the tasks out onto a list and sometimes, when I’m overwhelmed, just doing them in the order they are written. I have my issues with Newport, but I do ultimately like carving out long, unbroken stretches of time in my calendar to get some deep work done. Marie Kondo rubs me the wrong way, but I really like the idea of keeping the things that bring me some joy or comfort and use that as a measure for what to get rid of when I’m decluttering.

Reading these books, regardless of whether or not I’ve liked them, have introduced a lot of new ideas into my life and some practices that I’ve continued with. It’s just a matter of making sure I’m remembering to frame the contents in the context of my own life, taking what works well, and leaving the rest as something that might work better for someone else.

I’ve been actively working on figuring out how to make my life into a more ideal version of itself for a while now. I’ve read just a ton of books about improving my life and habits and generally how to get myself together. I’ve put together whole work plans to make myself recover when I got sick. And throughout it all, I’ve been adjusting this system.

But it’s coming to the end of the year and it feels like a good time to think a little about the process so far and what I’m finding.

I’m more aware of what I’m doing in general

This has a lot to do with the fact that I’m sitting down and very intentionally tracking everything right now as a result of the health issues, yes, but I had started moving towards this before. I have a better idea of what my priorities are, how often I switch between them, and how long they maintain my interest before they slip away. In the new year, I’ll be continuing this to get a better understanding of how to structure things, break them down, and create points where I can leave things for a while to let my creativity wander.

I am starting to really think about what I want

I have never been good at self reflection. I don’t think a lot about the things I want from that emotional or self reflective place. With everything that’s happened this past year, I have gotten a lot more insight into, if nothing else, the things that I really don’t enjoy, which has led me to try and think more about what I would like to do instead. And from that angle, I’m getting a better sense of what I want out of life.

My life does feel a lot more together

You guys, I have been an absolute chaos monster in the past. I hop between strategies to organize things, abandoning each over and over again in favour of something new and shiny that will be the actual cure for everything. But I finally feel like I’ve started from the right place and I’m putting in systems that are intended to be abandoned for a while or changed and focusing a lot more on the things that I’m realizing matter more.

Seeing progress is fantastic

Did I know before that I loved seeing the numbers change and watching myself get closer to my goals? Of course! But did I ever realize just how much seeing the changes happening would actually help with my motivation? I feel like I should have realized that this was going to happen like this.

I don’t feel as bad about not hitting my goals as I thought

There are a lot of things that had to be put aside this year that I’m not happy about, sure, but I’ve also made so much progress in other areas that I’m not as upset about the fact that I’ve had to let a lot of things go. There were some things I just lost interest in, some things that came up that I wanted to do instead, and a lot of things outside of my control that happened. And overall, I think I’m still doing pretty well for myself.

Now to figure out how to made adjustments for next year!

I may not be able to make my brain write fiction lately, but I’ve been keeping busy with a whole bunch of other creative adventures in the meantime!

We have jewelry!

We have Remy’s face on stuff!

We have a super secret thing that only the newsletter is hearing about!

And I have a quick update! I’m going to hold off on releasing any new stuff until January, so please stay tuned and I’ll let you know when there’s more! Yes, I know Christmas is just around the corner and I should be doing more but I am trying to rest for the year, so look forward to new releases come January.

As I healed from my brain issues (Still going through it, it’s a slow process) I started looking at what I had of my plans and processes that I’d developed so far. For me, I know it’s good to check in now and then to see what worked, what didn’t, and make changes as necessary. Since I hit the point where I returned to work at the and of September, I took some time to look at what I was doing so far and start to think about how it’s been going so far.

Does this work for me?

Step one, of course, was going through what I had done already and determine the things that were good, bad, and maybe needed a revision. So let’s go through some of the ideas that I had put forth and figure out if they worked for me.

Hypotheses

These really did not work at all. The idea I had was that these would focus me on what I needed to do to make improvements, but I did not end up looking at them at all. Many of them were also just not good. They were things I already knew would help, so they weren’t so much hypotheses as statements.

Metrics

These kind of worked. Some metrics were definitely better than others, but having a single place for all metrics was not a good idea. Things like my budget tracking, for instance, were just for my finances for the whole month and did not account for things like when my computer died or the levy for my building. This made the numbers look like I was over spending when I was actually just hit with unexpected expenses.

The idea of tracking numbers and measurable progress is good, but the details and methodology is not something I think works just yet.

Projects

Projects are absolutely something that work for me! I like having something firm that I can do with an end date and something measurable that comes out of them. The brain tracking for recovery was a great exercise in this and I definitely saw a lot of great things come of it. On top of that, it was great to have all of my tasks organized as a project.

Monthly wrap up routine

I started doing things on a monthly basis almost without thinking about it. It’s a habit I picked up from bullet journaling and I really liked having a routine of at least being able to sit down once a month to see my progress and make new plans to continue the momentum, or to see where I completely forgot about things.

What am I missing?

In doing all of this, I naturally found that I was missing something in this system.

Ongoing items

There’s things like habits that I really don’t have a good method of tracking. I know that drinking 2L of water a day does good things, as does going outside for a little for a walk, but it’s not really a metric that I know how to track within the existing system.

Check in routine

A formalized check in routine is going to be essential for figuring out how to make this work longer term. I don’t think doing it at the end of projects is really solid enough of a timeline, and I think that doing these revisions on a monthly basis with the end of the month wrap up might be too frequent. So I need to figure out something to see what works.

Next steps

Of course, with all of these things, I am going to start looking into things to revise. My current plans are:

1. Find some way to track ongoing habits within the system
2. Revise the existing metrics to work better for nuance
   1. See if those metrics are being tracked in the right place, or if they are even the right numbers
3. Remove the hypotheses
4. Plan for a formal check in and revision process once every 4 months