Good morning, friends.

I have a new-ish morning ritual. I creep downstairs so as not to wake my kid. I get out a glass. I go to the fridge. I get out a can of sparkling water. I get my thyroid meds. I count out my morning thyroid meds and supplements: one levothyroxine, three liothyronine, two l-tyrosine. I open the sparkling water and pour it into the glass. I open my bottle of liquid kelp (which I obviously need because I am a manatee) and squeeze four drops of it into the glass of water: one. two. three. four. And I sip the water and take my pills. Sometimes I play a game on my phone, sometimes I read. But today, I thought.

I sat in that sleepy barely-awake feeling, in my quiet kitchen, with the sky grey outside and the house cold because I keep it that way for sleep, and stared into space.

And three words came to me.

THE QUIET SPACE.

I’ve had an idea for a week or so and was trying to find a name for it. It’s a project/offering I want to put into the world, building on the Notion templates I’ve created. It’s something that takes my skills for organizing and my understanding of doctoral student life and academia and blends them to create a gift for the world.

And that gift is quiet space.

I wanted to do this as a video rather than a blog post but my kid is still sleeping.

The Quiet Space is a set of offerings that will create structure and space for scholars of all descriptions to focus on creating knowledge instead of managing it. The first offerings will continue to be Notion templates; I have a few more to put together. (I may also experiment with Google Sheets or ClickUp but for now I’m focused on Notion.)

Here’s the idea:

You, a knowledge creator, have a lot going on in your head. And administrative work, such as organizing your readings, tracking your revisions, managing copyright permissions - this stuff eats up space in your brain. It fills your brain with chatter about the best way to do these things. How should you create the structures to deal with them?

But what if the space that stuff ate up was open? And quiet? What if it was space you could use to move your ideas around and play with them? What if you took the time you’ve been spending banging your head against a metaphorical wall to figure this out and instead spent it outside looking at the clouds?

My offerings will be designed to open up that space for you, Scholar. I’ll see you in The Quiet Space soon.

❤️,

Kimberly

[Image caption: White clouds move across a blue sky over a silhouetted group of trees and some orange grass. In the bottom right corner, a stone path curves away into the distance.]