Tanya Lisle

Category: General

  • Lessons from being on leave

    Lessons from being on leave

    From July to September, I ended up on about a total of 2 months of leave. It was the longest I had ever not been working or in school, and the most time I had ever spent just with myself. Granted, I was on leave because my brain was completely busted and I was recovering from what amounted to a very bad concussion, but it was still a lot of time that I spent on self reflection and developing a whole lot of skills I didn’t have. And I learned a few things about myself in the process.

    It was like a mini retirement and it was pretty eye opening.

    My sleep issues might be work related

    I slept fine. That was the most surprising thing. I have been suffering with insomnia for years and had to adjust a whole bunch of things in my life to compensate for it in order to make sure I am able to get those hours of rest in. Medication, night routines, all kinds of things to deal with it.

    But on leave? With the brain problems that have a potential to cause sleep issues? Absolutely no problems. I have never had such an easy time with sleep in my life. The issues started to come back as soon as I was approved to go back to work, though.

    I will never be bored

    One of the things I hear about a lot about retirement is that you will get bored or that you will lose your purpose when you no longer have a day job to go to. That your work is a lot of people’s whole life and that they found themselves lost without it.

    I had so much that I could do during the days, though! I couldn’t write, which is my main thing but I could do a lot of other things that brought be joy. I made jewelry, I checked out some local events, and I started whole new projects that I’m still very interested in. I’m actually sad that I have to go back, if I’m being honest. Don’t tell work.

    I may not want to actively monetize my hobbies, but I don’t want to keep this stuff

    So many of my hobbies produce physical things. I have so much jewelry. I’m probably never going to do commissions for people or create anything explicitly for money, but I’m more than happy to sell it if it’s a way to not only get rid of it, but also to ensure that I continue to have funds I can use to make more.

    I just really like the freedom

    I had thought before of trying to be an entrepreneur, but I’m not about the hustle culture life. Especially not now, since I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to go back to the way I was again. But I would really like to eventually be able to work for myself, set my own hours, and prioritize my happiness again like that. It’s given me a lot to work towards, and a whole ton of perspective.

    And I’m already missing it. A lot.

  • I made too much jewelry

    I made too much jewelry

    With my brain unable to handle writing fiction due to all of the being sick, I picked up making jewelry again.

    After I already said I was going to stop making so much because how the heck am I going to sell it?

    Shipping from Canada is much too expensive.

    Surely no one is actually going to purchase anything, and I am not a jewelry maker. I’m an author!

    What am I supposed to do with these?

    I’m running out of space and I keep getting more materials.

    Someone please stop me.

    Or at least take them off my hands.

  • My life as a research project: The first project

    My life as a research project: The first project

    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    Picture it: I had done all the work to get myself ready. I had identified the areas of my life that were important to me, hypothesis around what would make those areas better, and clear metrics that would make it obvious when I was improving or not.

    And then I ended up breaking my brain.

    The easy-to-explain version is that I ended up with a disease-induced concussion. I was having trouble holding thoughts together, stringing words together, and having constant migraines, dizziness, all sorts of things that essentially took me right out. I was bedridden for a couple days, even! It was a rough time.

    But once I started to pull myself together a little, I tried to take this as an opportunity. Getting myself better could be the first thing. And so a new hypothesis and new metrics were born! ((Which took weeks to put together, but ignoring that…))

    If I can think clearly, I can accomplish my goals

    I had been told from friends who had been through the same thing what to expect and that was that I would essentially need to treat this like a concussion recovery program. I had no idea what that actually entailed, but I could figure out where I was now and where I wanted to be. So my key metrics were being able to maintain the following over three days without crashing:

    MetricStartingReturn to work goalRecovery goal
    Minutes per day I could maintain concentration on something over the entire day40240600
    Minutes I could sustain attention on a single task530120
    Average complexity of tasks (Scored out of 5)1.52.54

    With this in mind, I started tracking everything and trying everything I could to try and make those numbers good. I ran a lot of experiments on myself, from trying to make sure I was timing myself to make sure I was taking adequate breaks to actually writing down what I did on breaks so I knew which activities were restful and which ones were making me worse.

    As I figured out what worked and what didn’t, there were a lot of small, incremental changes. I started the day with planning what I was going to do. I used Pomodoro to make sure I stopped and didn’t work for longer than I knew I was able to, then increased as I went slowly. I started taking notes when I did anything so that I could reduce the amount my brain was actively working. And slowly, I was getting better.

    Some things didn’t ultimately matter that much. I wasn’t getting light headed, for instance, now that I was off work. Some tasks I’d initially thought were fairly light on the cognitive functions were actually a lot heavier than suspected. There were a bunch of things I just couldn’t do, such as writing. And I miss that, but I have to refrain until I’m better.

    And, of course, I had to adjust my systems a lot as I went along as I found things that worked or didn’t. For example, I needed to track conversations differently because I couldn’t take a break from them and often couldn’t take notes while I was talking to someone to try and refer to them later. Conversations were, really, the hardest things I did.

    Where were the medical professionals that could have helped guide me through this? That is a rant for another time.

    As I write this, I’m still very much in the process, but I have at least hit the return to work milestones. And hopefully that return to work won’t impede my progress on my way to a full recovery!

  • Mindset for pricing handmade goods

    Mindset for pricing handmade goods

    I’ve been making a lot of updates to the shop and I’ve come to figuring out how to list and price the jewelry I’ve been making. Jewelry has been something I actually can work on while I’ve been recovering from the brain issues, but I have never been good at figuring out pricing, even when my brain was functioning properly.

    When I was able to do markets, I would sometimes ask the other vendors how to they figured out what to charge. Many of them were doing this in hopes of going full time, and it’s something I would like to look into eventually as well. They told me some variation of the same thing:

    You need to value your own time and charge properly for your work.

    It’s an idea I’ve been very resistant to. I’ve thought largely about making pricing competitively, and about only charging what I would feel comfortable with paying for an item myself. I’m someone who goes to multiple stores and tries to find a good deal or wait for a sale, so the lowest I could possibly go and just enough to cover materials and feel like it was correct for the item.

    But that’s also not how I shop markets. That’s not what I do when I am looking at handmade goods, at custom jewelry, at things I know that was made by a person and not a factory. And that’s helped to shift my mindset.

    I’m also very aware that, while none of them ever said anything about it, it was making things harder for everyone else around me. Undervaluing my own work can make everyone else look like they are overvaluing their own, especially if they have something similar or if someone with something similar comes in on a day I’m not there. It’s not good for anyone to do it.

    So I’ve taken a lot of the general feelings out of the pricing, stopped choosing numbers based on what feels like a good deal, and turned everything into a mathematical formula. There’s a spreadsheet, though I’m now also considering making this into a whole program for myself. Now if only I could get into some markets and see if it’s worked!

  • My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics

    My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics

    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    Last time I got a whole bunch of ideas down and separated those into different key areas that I found important in life that I wanted to focus on. But there were a lot of items that fell into multiple different areas, so how did I deal with this?

    First off, I accepted that life is complicated and sometimes things aren’t neatly categorized. That’s just something that happens with life. But it also means that I get to possibly improve two things at once sometimes, which is always good!

    So with this in mind, I started brainstorming.

    The hypothesis

    Given that I had an idea of what would make my life amazing, I took these general ideas and started coming up with some hypothesis. Ideas of what I thought would make my life better if I did them, and made note of which areas these might fall into. They took the format of “I will be happier if” or “This will happen if” and I just wrote a bunch of them down.

    Some examples are:

    HypothesisAreas
    I get a restful night of sleep every night.Mental health, Physical health
    I have a plan for the day.Day to day life, Mental health
    My chores are done regularly and not forgotten about.Environment, Day to day life
    My mortgage is paid off.Money

    I’ve also made some notes about why these would improve my life, but I’m going to move on to the next key thing.

    How could I measure these?

    The metrics

    Something important about me is that I am not good at just sensing when something is improving. I am someone highly motivated by seeing numbers change and watching progress, so I knew I needed to have something to look at to determine if things were getting better.

    Some of these were pretty easy to find metrics for. How much is left on my mortgage? Did I create a plan for the day, yes or no? Pretty easy things, and there were pretty easy ways to track and measure these.

    Other things are not as clear. What counts as a restful night of sleep? Is that measured in hours? In how I feel in the morning? How easy it was to fall asleep? There’s a lot of factors, so I needed to brainstorm to come up with a bunch of them.

    And, because I know these numbers might change as I figure out if I’m even tracking the right things, I didn’t stress out too much about anything. I just tried to gather as many metrics as I could to track and then started to think of what should come next: Figuring out my baseline and coming up with my first project.

  • My novel project template for Notion

    My novel project template for Notion

    As many of you are likely aware by now, I’m a touch obsessed with Notion. As such, I have obviously made a template for how I do my writing projects now! It’s something that works really well for me so far, and here it is!

    To start with, the set up to do list. I think I could have a lot of this auto-populated for each story, but I find it is useful to intentionally create each item just so that I am thinking about all of these things.
    Underneath that, of course, is the pitch! This is intended to be the elevator pitch of the story. ((Which is something that I struggle with immensely))

    Next we have the board! I have a few other tabs for the calendar and any key documents that also pull out of the same list of things, but I work mostly out of the Kanban board. This is where I’ll put all of those checklist items and continue to add things as I need them.

    And, of course, I’m starting to think a lot more about marketing for upcoming projects. Trying. I’ll try to put together three comp titles for each project, as well as trying to think about who the ideal readers might be. This helps to figure out how to write things like the Listing information and also helps to determine what the marketing strategy might also be.

    I also have a table for Audience groups. This is relatively new, but I’m using it to try and determine if I could direct people who liked one series to another when they are done!

    Lastly, we have finances! Not only am I trying to keep track of the products that will come out of this series ((The books and anything else that might be related!)) but also what the expenses might be. Expenses are things like editing or art assets.

    And that’s basically how I keep track of it! Do you have a method to keep track of your projects?

  • Why I’m drop shipping most of my products

    Why I’m drop shipping most of my products

    I’ve been making a ton of updates to the shop and you may have noticed there are a lot of external links now! Which might seem odd, but let me explain.

    There is one main reason for this: Canadian shipping rates.

    If you are in Canada you likely already know about this, but it costs more than any of the items in my shop just to ship something to someone even just down the street from me. It is absolutely ridiculous and I cannot afford to keep prices reasonable and expect anyone who wants something from me to be not shocked at discovering a $25 charge to ship. It’s not fair to you.

    Given that I just design most products, I do have third parties that can ship items at a much better rate! Art of Where, most book retailers, even Redbubble can all offer much better shipping rates than I can hope to get access to.

    That’s not to say everything is going to be done by a third party! Obviously, signed paperbacks will still be coming from me, and anything that is not created and made to order. The jewelry, the charms, the zines, all still coming directly from me.

    Just know that these updates are very intentional and being done for the purpose of making sure you’re not paying double what you expect just so that it gets shipped to you.

  • My life as a research project: Discovery

    My life as a research project: Discovery

    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    So, it’s been about a month since I started looking at my life as a research project. It’s a daunting thing, because my life is full of all kinds of different aspects, so where do you even start with figuring out how to make it into whatever its ideal state is? What is ideal, anyway?

    Luckily, I am no stranger to exploratory research! This is how I started.

    Research

    Naturally, I started off with a list of questions I wanted to ask about myself as I am now and what I think would make me happy. I put a couple questions down, each on a separate sheet of paper, and left them by where I eat (When I don’t eat at my desk) so that I could answer them when I was taking some down time during the day. I left some fun pens so and did this over the course of two weeks so I could do this when I was having different kinds of day and in different moods with different perspectives.

    The questions I started with were:

    • What does is an ideal life?
    • What is a perfect day?
    • What do I like?

    There were others, but these were the ones I found were the most useful.

    Finding trends

    At the end of the two weeks, I wrote all of the things I wrote down onto post it notes ((In Miro, because I am in tech and for whatever reason tech companies always seem to use Miro these days)) and started to group the ideas together.

    You may notice that there are a lot of things that fall between groups. That is pretty normal, but I didn’t force these ones into one group or another. Sometimes one thing is meaningful for many things!

    From these groups, I could figure out a series of areas of life that I found important. For me this is:

    • Environment
    • Experiences
    • Physical health
    • Mental health
    • Day to day
    • Creative freedom
    • Money
    • Relationships
    • Pets

    Next steps

    I also came up with a few initial next steps we can cover in the coming months:

    • Refining the areas
    • Determining the current status of these areas
    • Finding metrics
    • Creating some hypotheses
  • 6 questions to ask before you pick up that new hobby

    6 questions to ask before you pick up that new hobby

    I collect hobbies. I write, garden, make jewelry and bottle charms, fold paper stars, design artwork, bake, all sorts of things. I’ve dabbled in resin making, used to dance, sometimes pick up making games, and am currently deep into determining how far I’m going to go into Notion.

    If you also collect hobbies to the point where you are getting overwhelmed, here’s a quick checklist to go through before you app another one to the list!

    New hobby checklist

    1. Have you slept on it? A new hobby can seem really exciting in the moment, but give yourself a little time to think about it and see if the motivation continues.
    2. Do you have the time for it? There is usually some kind of time commitment involved, whether that is taking classes or learning or even actually doing this hobby! Make sure it fits in with the rest of your life. As a tangent to this, if you are doing this with other people, do your schedules match up? Arranging things gets trickier the more people are involved, and you will want to make sure your schedules are compatible.
    3. Do you have the capacity for it? Make sure adding this isn’t going to completely overwhelm you. Even if you have the time to take that extra class, make sure you have the mental space to do it as well!
    4. Can you do a cheap trial run of it? New hobbies can be expensive. If you don’t know if you’ll like it, see if you can try it out without a huge cost investment first. Get a trial subscription, get a dollar store version of the art supplies, something to make sure this is something you want to do.
    5. If you create things as a result of the hobby, do you know what you are going to do with those things? Trust me, if a hobby ends with something physical, you are going to wan a plan for what to do with everything you make. There are only so many drawers, shelves, and wall space for everything you are going to make if you like doing it.
    6. Do you have storage for anything that you need for it? Does your hobby have a lot of materials or items attached to it? Skiing, snowboarding, fishing, these hobbies can have a lot of materials. Jewelry has a lot of small items that you don’t necessarily want to lose track of. Make sure that you have a place to put everything when you aren’t enjoying yourself.

    If you’re good on all of these, go ahead and see how you like that new hobby! Give it a try, and I hope you have fun with the new skills you will learn or the time you’ll get to spend with others!

    Write Your Story: Unlock Your Creative Potential

    Are you ready to embark on a journey into the world of storytelling? Look no further! Introducing Write Your Story, a comprehensive resource designed to fuel your imagination, enhance your storytelling skills, and bring your characters to life. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or simply someone who loves crafting stories, this workbook is your ultimate companion.

    This Workbook Contains:

    • Story planning spreads
    • Setting and location spreads
    • Character spreads
    • Writing session tracker
  • Revising my life

    Revising my life

    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    Well. All those self help books are getting to me.

    After all these years of reading and having a lot of trouble liking self help books, I have finally gotten to the point where some of the high level ideas are sinking in. I have issues with these books largely because they are very prescriptive and give you that one thing that will make your life amazing. It’s one central idea that you have to adapt and a bunch of tools that will make everything come together.

    But my life is larger than one or two areas. There’s a lot of different parts of it, and a lot of different things that I want to do. Different things I want to be eventually. One idea isn’t really enough to encapsulate all of that.

    So naturally, I’m starting to put together a system of my own to work out something that actually works for me.

    Given that this has been a rough year for me, I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection and I’m starting to put together what I actually want out of life. I’m doing a discovery phase with myself, trying to decide what I think a great life would be like and where I’m at now. It’s a lot of discovery for the moment, but I’ll be documenting some of my process as I go and see if I can find something that works. I’ve read enough of these self help books! I’m sure I’ve absorbed enough to make this work.

    So stay tuned and I’ll talk more about the process, what’s working and what isn’t. It should be fun!