Announcements

• Co-working for premium newsletter subscribers is this Saturday, May 23rd, from 11am-1pm EDT. It’s a great place to complete those aversive admin tasks!

• Let’s work together! I am currently seeking new Success & Accountability Coaching clients who are looking for a six-month partnership to help finish their most important academic, writing, and creative projects!

Throughout May, I have focused on tending to my nervous system with physical and mental rest, as well as creative cultivation and social connection. This was a great practice for me and helped me fill my own cup, particularly after working so hard to hit a milestone that required dozens of hours of thinking, writing, and practicing out loud (plus many mugs of hot tea).

May feels like a bridge, or maybe a walk through a flower garden. It’s a pathway for me to move from point A (a busy April where I prepared and presented a keynote speech) to a future Point B, where my next project awaits me.

I knew that taking time to rest before I dove into planning the next steps in my personal and professional projects was going to help me show up with more curiosity and capacity, and I was right! Now that I’ve reached the goal-setting stage of the bridge, I’m feeling more energized and aware that spaciousness is something I should carry with me when I embark on new projects.

While I was working on my summer planning practice–which I’ll dive deep into in next week’s solo episode on the Honing In podcast (subscribe here so you don’t miss it!)–I knew I’d have to be careful not to set unrealistic goals.

Like everyone else I know, I can get tripped by cognitive biases when it comes to planning. I recorded a whole podcast about realistic goal setting, but I’ll give you a quick refresher here of two biases that trip us up when it comes to setting goals:

• The Optimism Bias occurs when we overestimate the likelihood that we will have a positive experience and underestimate the likelihood that we will run into challenges.

• The Planning Fallacy occurs when we underestimate how much time or resources a project or task will take us to complete.

Knowing that I wanted to set summer goals that felt realistically accessible, I returned to a free workshop I ran in 2024: How to Effectively Reach Your Goals This Season.

The workshop is rooted in tenets of my work as a sustainable and well-being-oriented Productivity Coach: making your goal actionable and achievable, and setting goals with awareness of personal patterns with obstacles like the Optimism Bias, Planning Fallacy, and other behaviors or perspectives that might set you up for challenges or success.

If you’ve attended any of my virtual or in-person workshops, you’ve felt my frustration with productivity culture’s obsession with efficiency. I get waiting to “optimize your output,” when your to-do list is longer than a CVS receipt, but trying to pack as much work as possible into less time (while using less energy) won’t work for everyone. In fact, efficiency is not a reliable metric for measuring the likelihood that your goal will be reached, because the experience isn’t consistent from person to person.

I might be efficient when it comes to quickly responding to emails from colleagues and clients, but if I don’t add the action items we discussed to my task list, then the efficiency is not effective. Having a system for tracking action items outside of my inbox is much more effective in the long term than quickly filtering and responding to emails.

What would it mean to consider our success through the lens of effectiveness, where we’re intent on “producing a desired, decisive, or desired effect?” I’ll wait here while you ponder that…

My friend, when we aim for effectiveness over efficiency, we make a plan that acknowledges our individual needs around time, energy, and focus. We strategically chip away at our tasks with intention, versus racing to finish, which may cause overwhelm and burnout. This is exactly what you’ll learn about in my free workshop.

On my podcast next week, I’ll use the prompts from the workshop to develop my own actionable, achievable, and realistic plans for effectiveness this summer–plus I’ll share new ways I’m updating the Effective Planning process in 2026. Because you opened my email today and read to the end (thank you so much), you get early access to the workshop.

The workshop is available both as a video recording with a transcript and closed captions, and as a slide deck so you can follow along with the prompts on your own. Sign up here and I’ll send it straight to your inbox. See you over there!

Curiosities

• I enjoyed Meredith Farkas’s chapter “Neoliberal Time and the Promise of Slow Librarianship” from the book Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices (available for free in the Knowledge Works Commons!). I’m a big fan of Farkas’s practical conception of slow productivity in her newsletter, Information Wants to Be Free, and this piece is a wonderful look at how knowledge work can be more accessible and supportive.

• I also liked Rosie Spinks’s essay “A project will save you,” which was a recommendation from Nic Antionette’s awesome newsletter, Now What? Obviously I’m fascinated with projects (I made a podcast about them) and this was a thoughtful reflection on how we engage with projects outside of work.

• My talented friend Catherine LaSota was a guest on the Moonbeaming Podcast. I love listening to my friends share their wisdom, and this interview was an invitation for me to think about my creative practice in unique ways.

• Last week I wrote about pausing for celebration, rest and reflection after reaching a milestone (instead of diving straight into the next one). You can read that here.

• The last curiosity today is a dog name suggestion: Tailgate. Very cute! Could be nicknamed to TG or gator.

Take care and talk soon,

Dr. Kate

Email: kate@katehenry.com

Website: katehenry.com

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