Hey friends,

Which plants love Halloween the most?

Bam-Boo! 🎋👻

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

Crunch Time is here! How are you handling your stress?

I haven't always handled stress well during busy periods—these periods of Crunch. There have been times where I've white-knuckled it, times I've become prickly and aggressive, times where I've crawled into an emotional and exclusive hole after work hours, and other times where I've avoided it all until a last-minute, caffeine-fueled, nocturnal Wild Hunt.

All of those resulted in a cost of some kind that was collected at the end of the Crunch, either to my health or to my relationships. So how do we respond evenly and gracefully to times of intense work? How do we avoid having the Crunch steal things from us that we'd rather not trade away?

I wish I could say I've figured it out! I still flub it sometimes, but I HAVE found a few ways that we make the Crunch HARDER for ourselves than it needs to be:

1. We put undue pressure on ourselves with unrealistic expectations.
2. We wait until there's a looming critical mass instead of chipping away at it gradually.
3. We go into the Crunch with low energy or health issues.
4. We have poor energy-reclamation strategies, spending time instead on things that are energy parasites.
5. We allow the Crunch to consume our 'brain-space' outside of work hours.
6. We have poor sleep habits.

When we do these things, the Crunch can be consuming, robbing us of our sleep and fueling our anxiety. The times that I've worked myself up into a lather, the activity was frenetic but not always productive. It often led to diminishing cycles, increasing my worry because I could tell I wasn't as productive as I'd like to be, which then led to me stressing out even MORE.

Certain factors are sometimes beyond our control (you don't get to choose when you get sick, or when a health condition pops up) — but the one factor I CAN reliably control and protect is my mindset. I can be kinder to myself on my unspoken expectations. I can use rituals, like family dinners or a drive home from a workspace, to help create a boundary for work thoughts so they don't dominate my evenings. I can set reasonable bedtimes and not let Netflix or my phone steal that sleep on the empty promise of energy regeneration.

Individually, these things seem small and trite, but the times I've actually fought to protect my mindset both before and during a Crunch are the times I've gotten through them with the most success. The end of the year usually contains a Crunch or three, so what are you doing to prepare yourself?

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• Emil is back with 7 practical animation tips.
• "Fear isn’t the enemy in teamwork — silence is.". 👏
• I feel like this list NNGroup put together on UX maturity regression could also apply to other disciplines as well.

Other Stuff

• Terence Eden writes about the unnerving yet unsurprising truth that media companies are not fact-checking themselves.
• There's a website that catalogs every appearance of Moai in games 🗿
• There's also a website that's a banana portal. 🍌
• Charlie (the bank) released an effective campaign about warning your family (especially older members) about deepfakes.
• I love that blog feeds are continuing to be promoted and touted as avenues of connection. MOAR BLOGS!

Watch and Play

• 📺 Cats + Dominos.
• 📺 An animated short about snacks and perception.
• 🎮 Gnomitaire: a tiny solitaire for clever gnomes.