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

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.

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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!