Oh, hi friends!
Best intentions! Lofty goals! You have them, I have them, my cat has them, we all have them.
Here’s an example: I wanted to launch my podcast as a daily podcast leading up to the Do It Today release. A bit crazy, right. But I set up a few systems in place (blocking time on my calendar for interviews, figuring out my software).
Well, it turns out making a podcast takes a lot of time. Totally fine, and essentially manageable.
But then there’s all the other stuff that comes up: deadlines, priorities, commitments, distractions.
So here’s the thing I’m trying to remember:
You can revise your intentions at any point.
You don’t have to hold on to a previous goal, especially if it no longer makes sense in your life. In fact, it’s a subtle act of self-sabotage to keep thinking you need to do something in the first way, the previous way, your old mode of thinking.
Unless you revise your intentions, you’re working off an old draft.
That doesn’t serve you or the process.
(And the podcast is returning, by the way! Copy was due this week for my third (!) journal, a fact I forgot to bake into my original podcast workflow. But I am revising my intentions and pressing on! Meanwhile, here are all the episodes so far.)
Anyway, hope this might make sense to you?
Don’t hold too tightly to your first idea. Better to move forward than keep circling the past.
Composer and lyricist Jerry Herman on finding the finish line:
"There's a point I'd like to make. Everybody asks you, 'How long does it take to write a song?' The actual writing time at the piano, or walking on the streets of New York, may be a half hour or a day or a week, but the actual gestation time, the time that it has been percolating in my brain, might be a year and a half. So the answer is hard to be accurate about. I wrote the song 'Mame' in twenty minutes, or I wrote 'Mame' in a year and twenty minutes.”
From Notes on Broadway: Intimate Conversations with Broadway's Greatest Songwriters, courtesy of Aliza Rabin.
Maybe you’re in the final stage, or maybe you’re in the gestation stage of a project. Either way, these words are comforting.
Work is still happening, so long as your mind keeps turning it over.
Cure for Tab Overload
There are 13 feature articles in my Notes app that I want to read immediately, profiles of writers and actors, theater reviews, pieces people have forwarded to me, and also 50 older links in a note titled “To read.”
I gather articles like this in a list as a solution to the ubiquitous tab overload problem. After doing this for many years, I’m incapable of having more than a handful of tabs open at once, usually just my calendar, inbox, whatever I’m working on, and one or two articles. Any more than that and my brain starts fritzing out—there is just so much to read, see, and do. Collecting what is interesting in a list and reading them later when I have time helps me stay calm and less distracted. (Or so I hope!)
I try to have faith I will read what I need to read eventually — and if I don’t, that’s OK, too.
In any case, I just wanted to say it’s alright if you don’t get to reading or consuming or sharing all the things this week.
They’re not going anywhere. You’ll connect with them when you’re able.
Give yourself a break. You did what you could. You’re doing what you can. And that is enough.
Tab overload is REAL 🔗