A day in the life.

MEA CULPA: Last Friday, I resent last Tuesday's email to everyone who hadn't opened it yet ........ except, uh, I screwed up and sent it to a much larger segment than that. I'm sorry if you got the duplicate, and grateful for everyone who took the time to let me know they'd already opened the original email. You guys are the best, and I won't make that mistake again — though I've no doubt I will make plenty of others!

Now, on to your regularly scheduled (no, really, I scheduled it right after I sent the last one!) news and whatnot.

Feeling this very deeply these days ... and by this, I mean, every stage of the journey, in rapid succession, sometimes in 3-hour cycles. ☠️ If you're feeling burned out too, I want to point you to a couple of resources.

First, you should check out this series of videos by Becca Syme on burnout and the concept of "energy pennies" — Becca is amazing, and she probably saved my life by helping me realize how badly burned out I was in 2019. Watching that series of videos is a bit of a time commitment; I strongly believe that you should make that commitment.

I've had a long road back from burnout, and I am very wary about getting myself into burnout again. To help with that, I use (incorrectly, LOL; more on that in a second) an app called RescueTime to help me keep my work/life balance in check.

RescueTime tracks everything you do on your computer (and your phone, if you set your account up that way) and tells you exactly how long you spend on/in any specific project/app/website. For the most part, it natively understands what's "work" and what's "goofing off" (and you can refine that by telling it how to categorize things) and helps you get a picture of how much time you spend doing each of those things.

I think most people use it to make sure they spend enough time working. Me? I use it to make sure I spend enough time goofing off. When I review my stats for the week, my goal is not to work more than 50 hours.

That probably sounds like a lot of hours to some folks, but a lot of it is creative work (as opposed to busywork), and creative work really energizes me. So on way I'm keeping (relatively) sane is to focus on creating tons of new content over here in the Ninja-labs. Much of it is nearing completion (switching tasks frequently also energizes me), and I'm super excited to share it with you soon.

Bad news / good news alert!

Bad news: As you can see in the banner above, Automation Black Belt has been moved to the Book 3 position in what is apparently now a series of Newsletter Ninja books. As I told everyone sadly and pitifully back when I canceled that preorder, the book was simply not good. It's much better now, but it's still not ready. I'm going to run a couple more sessions of the new-and-improved Newsletter Ninja Advanced class (now open for December registration) before I'm ready to dive back into it and actually publish it.

Good news: There is a new book in the Book 2 position, and you are going to love it. I have high hopes it will be out before the end of this month, but I have learned some hard lessons this last few years, so I make no promises. But it'll be here Soon™. I'm comfortable promising that. 🤪 And I'll show you the cover in my next newsletter.

Vague tease alert!

Also possibly coming this month (but just as possibly next month, depending on development) is something a bit outside my wheelhouse: an actual tool to help with your newsletter. Until now, I've mostly handed out advice—and I think it's excellent advice—but it's time to give you something a little more concrete, a little more actively helpful. I don't want to say more than that, but I really think you're going to love it. I had to get a partner to help me produce this, which means some parts of this are out of my hands, but I'm told we're looking at 30-60 days.

(And for those of you that won't love this tool, I will have something roughly analogous, in a different format, that you might like instead. How's that for vague?)

Cookie alert!

Based on email feedback, there are a few concepts in Newsletter Ninja that confuse folks, or at least concepts on which they'd like to get some clarity and/or handholding. So the first-ever Newsletter Ninja mailing list cookie will be designed to walk you through one of those concepts in a more concrete way. Again, I know you are going to love it. So stay tuned! I think that will show up in the next newsletter as well.

Oh, and if you find Becca's videos about burnout useful, she has a book on the same topic. You can find that here: https://amazon.com/dp/B07X66MHDZ/

Talk soon,
Tammi

PS: (While I was getting the RescueTime link for this post, I happened across a great blog post about burnout; you can find that here: https://blog.rescuetime.com/burnout-syndrome-recovery/)