explore

A flip through my Holiday planning

I can't tell you how tempted I am by December Daily. I love the idea of having holiday-specific books that can come out with each year's Christmas decorations. But with the weekly Project Life, I don't need a whole other scrapbook, ya know?

So instead, I updated my traditional holiday planning guide (I can't believe we've been using it for 3 years!) with a scrapbook of recipes and decorations.

At the end of the season I'll have a compendium of what I wanted to do and what I actually do. This way, next year I stand a chance of remembering the decorations I wanted to make or the recipes I wanted to try (and which ones worked…or didn't).

To get started, I added in pictures from last year. When we put up this year's tree I'll add an extra page.

I also made notes of what I want to change or redo this year.

And I couldn't leave out our favorite ornament! (The Yay sticker comes with the kit.)

Of course, there's also business-y pages in the book:

And the beloved Giant List of Doom:

Don't let that list scare you! The Guide is all about breaking it down into do-able to-dos and getting it done.

You can see that I altered the standard weekly list a bit, by adding a little right hand column that includes the ongoing stuff I want to do each week (blog, read, run)..and I also got smarter about adding stuff to the week, splitting it into work and play.

As the Holiday Sanity kits are filtering out into the rest of the world, I've just loved seeing how everyone uses it to plan the season.

Here's Amy's,

and Rebecca's List of Doom:

Everything you see in the above pictures (except for my own photos!) comes with the kit:

How do you organize this busy time of year?

Do you have your own system or are you using Holiday Sanity?

PS. $5 from every kit goes to Red Cross Disaster Relief. Thanks to your planning genius I was just able to make another donation, right before hitting publish! Woo!

Want more survival tips? Check out the (free) Definitive Guide.

Funerals, travel, and holidays: how to make your business more sustainable, from the hard times out.

As some of you know, I was out of town last week for a funeral. My husband's grandpa died. And it was hard, beautiful, and…exhausting. When we got back into town, I couldn't think clearly enough to work.

Funerals, deaths, and heck, even the holiday season is stressful enough without also having to think about your business, and your bills.

I'm blessed that I was prepared: the Holiday Sanity Kits continued to sell, the payment plans on the Starship came in on time, new people found my site and signed up for emails and got their How to Explore lessons, my bills got paid – because it's all automated and mobile-ready. The Starship, which can't be automated (the live chats, weekly emails, forum answers all require my time and attention), still sailed on – because I have systems for communicating, organizing, and responding on the go.

As I came back to work yesterday to deal with my swelling inbox, I thought about all that had happened in my business without me even looking at it. The people who got to know me because of what I've created here. The people who started pursuing Holiday Sanity. Not because I did anything special, but because I'm working very hard to build a business that can survive life.

It's easy to say that funerals and travel (and busy holiday seasons) are unusual. To assume this is something rare. That the this is just a bump in your otherwise stable business. That dealing with that kind of rush of orders (or personal life) is just something you have to survive for a few months.

But the fact is, this IS your business and your life.

Messy, sad, busy, exciting, exhausting, time off for recovery or traveling and handling whatever comes up.
Sitting down to write, standing in line at the Post Office, answering emails.
Your business is built in the quiet, focused, planned times.

But it's not really a business until it survives through the messy, busy, scattered times.

How your business behaves in the hard times is a sign of its overall health.

If you can't take an afternoon off to bake cookies, or you're buried under holiday orders – this is a sign that your biz needs to get healthier. Instead of looking at this crazy time as something to get through, approach it as a time of training and information-gathering.

In these crazy times, your business is telling you what it needs. It might be automation, scaled up production or shipping efficiency This is what your business needs to not only thrive when you're busy, but to grow into what you want it to be.

Instead of powering through the hard times (and holiday season!), learn from them. Take notes, make lists, experiment.

What is your business (and life) telling you it needs right now?

Need to take an extended leave from your biz? Check out my course with Stacey Trock of FreshStitches: Take a Break (without breaking your biz!)

Want more survival tips? Check out the (free) Definitive Guide.

The Holiday Sanity Kit gives you the space, questions, and system for learning from your busy holiday season. Make plans, get to work…and then reassess what actually worked and what didn't.
Grab yours here.

How to Experiment (and scare yourself)

Confession: during this session of the Effective Blog class, I've been following along with the students and doing the homework myself. You see, I'm kinda ambivalent to blogging, but I love experimenting. But how I feel about blogging is old stuff. It's not new or based on the current reality. I need to experiment, to see if everything is true or not. The other day in class, Diane mentioned that she likes to do 30-day experiments to see if something works or not. That, combined with this post from Elise, combined with the excellent stuff I learned during our live discussion, inspired me to get started now.

So I'm doing a public 30 day experiment, right here. And I'd like you to join me.

I didn't plan on saying anything about it, but I'd like to have some company. And experimenting is better when we do it together. I'd love for you to join in with me, to hold your own experiment!

Before we get in to it, let's talk about what makes a good experiment (you can find full How to Experiment instructions on page 100 of the book.)

How to Experiment

1. Set a thesis. What do you want this experiment to do for you? What do you think will happen?

2. Set the parameters. How long is this experiment? What will it entail? (You are so much more likely to stick with something if it has a clear end date. You'll also get better results if you plan a time to stop and reassess.)

3. Put the support system in place to hold it. What will you need in time, space and energy to do the experiment? How can you set up your day, week and life to make that possible?(Hint: if you're not writing every day now, something will have to change for you to be able to do that next week. Time, space, tools, etc.)

4. Review the results. What worked? What didn't? At the end of the experiment, make notes about the results, how you felt, and what you learned. Use it to set up your next experiment!

You can use this to experiment with anything (going vegan, trying a new marketing channel, increasing sales, etc). The really important thing here is to experiment with things that you expect a clear result from in the time allotted.

For our experiment, we're going to start today, and stop on 9/3. That's not very long, so pick something do-able for that long, and set your goal small. Very small. Even smaller than that. Got one? Ok!

Here's mine:

1. Thesis: blogging every weekday until 9/3 will increase my connection with the community or readers and explorers. How will I know that happened? People will join me in creating their own experiment, and even more people (let's say, twice as many) will join me for the next group experiment in September. (This will probably also result in more emails, Twitter conversation, etc, but I'm not measuring those.) This all serves my Big Goal for more connection (via vulnerability) in my life + work.*

2. Parameters: The experiment ends 9/3. It includes sharing something publicly here, in this space, every weekday. Something useful, entertaining or inspiring. At least once a week I'll hit “publish” on a post I'm a little afraid of.**

3. Support systems in place: Time to write every morning, creating a list of possible topics to carry me through the whole month, scheduling the ones I feel inspired to write. (In other words, my classic non-planning planning.) I'll talk more about the tools I use later.

*This goal isn't that business-y, because I'm plenty busy with current clients. But what I've learned through building the Starship is that there's an amazing private, deep community there, and I'd like to supplement that with a broader, more public community outside the Starship, so that everyone can experience at least a bit of the magic of exploring with others. In order to do create that, I have to stop doing all my stuff in the privacy of one-on-one and Starship work, and start bringing it here. That's the reason for this experiment!

**This week, that post would be this, right here!

That's my experiment. Would you like to join me with your own?

You can experiment on absolutely anything! (Blogging regularly, blogging about different topics, using Twitter, FB, Instagram or whatever in a new way…the possibilities are endless!)

To join in, just leave a comment with your experiment (including thesis, parameters, etc), and we can check with each other using #experimentFTW on Twitter or Instagram. Prefer to keep it private? Email me! On 9/3 we'll be back here with a new experiment!

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