Announcements

• There’s only one spot left for a Success & Accountability Coaching client to start working together in May or June. This is perfect if you’re writing a dissertation, preparing for tenure, or trying to finish your book manuscript, and are seeking a personalized approach to sustainable productivity. I’m also adding folks to my waitlist for later in the year. If you’re curious about working together, I invite you to book a free 30-minute Discovery Call to hat about how coaching can support you.
  

• Co-working for premium newsletter subscribers and Success & Accountability Coaching clients is next Wednesday, May 6th from 12-2pm EST. Bring your current project and enjoy the camaraderie! Here are all of the details and co-working dates for May and June.

Wow! We’ve made it to the end of April!

The snow has thawed, the grass is re-emerging, and the local rabbits are hopping around our back yard. What does spring look and feel like where you are?

I’ve been working on a personal goal that I’m excited to share with you. Tomorrow, I’m giving a keynote address! I’ll be talking about my journey from obsessive workaholism to disentangling my worth from my work to the curiosity and care I bring to productivity practices now. It’s the longest public speech I’ve given since I started researching personal productivity eight years ago, and I hope it’s the first of many I’ll share with the world. If you’re looking for a speaker for your event, I’d be excited to customize something for your group! You can always reach out by replying directly to this email.

In the past, when I had an idea for the Next Big Thing I wanted to immerse myself in, I announced it in my newsletter… perhaps a little sooner than I needed to. I’m a believer in learning from our patterns of behavior so we can set more realistic goals and choose actionable paths forward (I call this framework Proactive Plans and Acute Actions). So, eight years into researching and writing publicly, I now accept that making a big announcement that I WILL BE STARTING A PROJECT is not a helpful accountability tool for me. 

A public claim at the start of a project is often helpful for my friends and clients, and I celebrate that move as a fulcrum for getting shit done. But for me, issuing an announcement about a brand new project feeds my ego more than my motivation. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to share personal experiments and research (like the habit-tracking process I wrote about a couple months ago as a model for others who want to build new habits). I’m talking instead about rushing to fill your inboxes the moment a bolt of idea lightning hits me, when I think “this could be something” or ask “should I have a yearlong experiment and write a book about it?!” 

Those moments are better ruminated on than shared. 

You know that phrase “don’t put the horse before the cart”? It means don’t mix up the order of operations in a way that bungles your process. The fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear says “May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?” Which is quite a mouthful, hence the modern-day take on the saying.

I could tell you all about my dream “cart”—whether it’s a book, or a website, or a podcast (maybe it’s a personal project and stays that way, how novel!). I could detail how fancy it’ll be, how smart I’ll prove I am by sharing it, and how it’ll exponentially improve the quality of my life. I could fall into the daydream of what my cart will be and write up a hundred mind maps. But what about the horse that needs to pull it?

What about the momentum needed for the cart to MOVE, so that it’s more than a smoke and mirrors display of a shiny new idea? Those are the pieces that fascinate me, and often, they require tending to before I can know what it would mean for anyone else that I share them with.

With all of that in mind, I would like to share a little bit of my process today. Inspired by many other newsletter writers I love and respect, I’ll share to a much smaller audience of premium subscribers after the paywall break. If you’re a free subscriber, I love you! I’ll be back in your inbox a week from today with more good stuff.