Posts in "Long Posts"

Newsletter: You Got This

I have been really digging newsletters for the past several months. I’m planning to do a write up of my faves soon. But for now, think about these questions:

Are we BFFs? Should we be BFFs? Do you like to imagine we’re BFFs?

If the answer to any of these is yes, my new newsletter is for you. (Sorry, the two people who signed up for my old secret newsletter… This is a whole different thing. But it’s still for you.)

A really common exercise to help people decide how to spend their time is to ask them to imagine their funeral. What do they want to be remembered for?

The only answer I consistently come up with is that I want the people gathered to all feel, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I cared about them.

My brother-in-law got married this past weekend. My mother-in-law had to give a speech at the rehearsal dinner. She was self-conscious going into it. At the reception, she told me that as she stood there, she thought, “Well, Kimberly would tell me I can do this, so I can.” And thinking of that helped her get through it, and of course she did a beautiful job.

I want as many people as possible to feel that way. I don’t know what kind of reach this newsletter will have or where it will go. But I hope each person who reads it will feel like they’re not alone, like someone believes in them, like someone has their back.

I’m describing it as

Like a high five in your inbox. Platonic love notes and things that made me think of you.

If that sounds like something you would like to have in your life, you can sign up here.

 

Planning Microtasks to Match Your Energy (or Spoons)

I’m fairly open about the fact that I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and polycystic ovary syndrome and that fatigue is my primary symptom for both of these. I’m in the middle of a Hashimoto’s flare up, and today I sat down and made a little table of the types of tasks I can do depending on what type of day I’m having: low energy, medium energy, or high energy.

This is a valuable table because often I think that, since I’m working on a writing project and a curriculum development project, I can only ever get any work done on high energy days. But that’s not so, because each of those projects is made up of smaller tasks. Writing up my literature review workflow really helped me set up this table. Here it is in list form, in case it would be valuable for anyone else.

Literature Review Tasks

Low Energy

  • Literature search

Medium Energy

  • AIC review
  • concept map
  • revision

High Energy

  • synthetic note
  • memo
  • outlining
  • writing

Curriculum Development

Low Energy

  • identify resources
  • format documents

Medium Energy

  • outline

High Energy

  • write

 

Spider-Woman

Reading the Hopeless/Rodriguez run of Spider-Woman and feeling super seen.

Sorry for weird colors- I use a blue light filter app and it affects my screen grabs.

Anyway, highly recommend for parents-to-be or new parents.

Which, I recently read a thing that says postpartum is three years, so if you, like me, have been doing this for almost two years already and don’t feel a lot more competent than you did in the first six weeks, don’t feel bad.