The last of the patterns went up this month, and I’m out of art to put up for a little while as I start to try to write more!
Medium
Not really a release, necessarily, but I’ve been experimenting with Medium! I’ll be cross posting my old articles, but also doing a little experiment with trying to figure out what direction I want my career to go in!
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:
Find some way to track ongoing habits within the system
Revise the existing metrics to work better for nuance
See if those metrics are being tracked in the right place, or if they are even the right numbers
Remove the hypotheses
Plan for a formal check in and revision process once every 4 months
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:
Metric
Starting
Return to work goal
Recovery goal
Minutes per day I could maintain concentration on something over the entire day
40
240
600
Minutes I could sustain attention on a single task
5
30
120
Average complexity of tasks (Scored out of 5)
1.5
2.5
4
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!
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!
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:
Hypothesis
Areas
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.
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?
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.
