Hello friend, 👋🏾
This past weekend I attended an all-day mindfulness retreat, which I must say, was absolutely wonderful. I’ve recently begun meditating again with more regularity. I’m doing two sessions per day, and it’s so helpful in helping me to reduce stress and overwhelm, two things I really struggle with.
Another ongoing struggle is with organization of my office, house, computer, and mind. I mentioned mental decluttering a few weeks back and the meditation really helps with that. Now on to the rest, which is the theme of today’s issue.
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📝 Digital Decluttering
I’ve become a fan of the weekdaily podcast, The Newsworthy, whose tagline is “Fast, Fair, Fun, and On the Go.” I find the cable news networks to be a nightmare, and after trying a few other podcast options for daily news, I’m quite happy with this one at the moment.
Saturdays they have an extra edition and this weekend’s was on digital cleaning 101, featuring an expert in digital organization. As I was recently lamenting the state of my Mac’s folders, I found it quite helpful.
At times, I’ve tried for Email Inbox Zero (an impossible task to keep up), and I’m a huge fan of a nearly empty desktop, but I still struggle with maintaining a well-organized digital space.
This 15 minute episode is well worth a listen. My biggest takeaways are that, like physical clutter, digital clutter can affect our mental health and stress us out. Setting aside 5-10 minutes per day to tidy your email, delete old photos, remove screenshots and old downloads is well worth the time.
And I must say, I’ve never really thought about cleaning up my Downloads folder (unless my hard drive space is filling up) but now it’s going on my to-do list.
📝 Declutter Your Time
I teach a workshop called “Organizing Your Writing Life” on time management and productivity for human writers. (I’m guessing the AI ones don’t have a problem with it.) It’s based on my experience running multiple businesses over the past few decades. This article from Notion guru Marie Poulin on Designing Your Ideal Week dives into a topic that I find extremely useful.
Planning my ideal week is a great way to find my blindspots and wrap my head around the realities of what can realistically get done. Which is not to say that I do this perfectly or even well, LOL.
As I write this, it’s two hours later than I’d planned on my daily schedule to be putting this newsletter together. But it’s not tomorrow, and I’ll count that as a win.
All humans suffer from the cognitive bias of planning fallacy: we under-estimate how long things take, how much they’ll cost, and the risks involved. We also don’t account for obstacles, delays, or challenges that might arise.
Please know that I say “we” very intentionally — so if you feel personally attacked please know that you are definitely not alone; this is a well-known phenomena.
In addition to time blocking her days, Marie themes her days or parts of her day. For example, grouping administrative tasks in a block or on a specific day, and scheduling YouTube content creation for a block on another day every week.
My big takeaway here is the idea of keeping Fridays largely unscheduled and available for buffer and overflow from the rest of the week. Daily buffer time is also important. I’m two hours late today partly because I only had a half hour of buffer time on the schedule today and several tasks went over their allotted time. Realistically, I could use several 30 minute buffer blocks per day.
Being self-employed and largely in control of my own schedule makes this a larger task. But if you work a day job with set hours then scheduling writing time, marketing and admin time is even more vital.
💡Overwhelmed by Your Story?
If you don’t feel clear on your story idea and not sure how to take it from its initial idea to a fleshed out narrative, the Story Seed Mini-course can help!
You’ll get a blueprint for setting a strong foundation for your story with a process that I use on my award-winning novels. The PDF workbook and video lesson guide you through a proven method to get clear on your idea, flesh it out, and start writing faster.
🚀 Quick Bites
Amazing Fact Generator - which is just what it sounds like. If you like random trivia, you might enjoy this site. Example: “According to one study, dunking an Oreo in milk for three seconds gives you the optimal balance of sogginess and structural integrity.” h/t to Kim Scaravelli’s newsletter where I learned about this.
I also immensely enjoyed this tweet with many examples of “wildest early Quaker names.” Imagine dancing through life responding to the name “Experience Cuppage” or “Love Beer” or “Revolution Sixsmith.” These could also be useful if you’re starting a band…
Author Sarra Cannon’s HB90 Bootcamp is open for registration. This is a class I took several years ago that helped me with my quarterly planning, goal setting, and organization. I’m an affiliate because I love it, so check it out if these things are a struggle for you.
"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.”
— June Jordan
🎙️ My Imaginary Friends
The podcast is on a summer break, but check out previous episodes here.
The My Imaginary Friends podcast is a weekly, behind the scenes look at the journey of a working author navigating traditional and self-publishing, where I share insights on the writing life, creativity, inspiration, and this week’s best thing.
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Image: I was trying to do a melting computer in the style of Dali’s melting clock with Midjourney and this is what came out.