#no need to reinvent the wheel and also sharing is caring if someone gives you free lesson content take it

[eggs-love-loki]

There’s no teacher joy like getting a “yeah it was pretty cool” from a middle school student about an activity you did with them

[sillygirlblogging]

May 22, 2023

in my anxiety era.

no literally all i feel is anxiety. therefore my guts are in ruins and i feel sick inside and out. i want to be excited and optimistic about the future but i'm being dragged down because reality is hitting me. i'm completely uncertain about my future, i don't even know what i'm going to do this week, much less my life.

i feel completely hopeless. what if there's no options for my future that will make me happy. part of my brain keeps telling me that i fail at everything and that i should give up now. i'm not good at school, but much worse than that is how hard it actually is for me to transfer universities for some reason. and it's just way too expensive for me to continue to go to the university i last went to. not to mention i just have to leave that state immediately (if you knew which state, you would understand).

i also feel like i have no idea my options or how to find out anything about them. why is so much information so hard for me to find? am i truly just an idiot? how does everyone else just... do life? and i am the only one left behind, confused as hell as to what i'm supposed to do. did everyone else's parents help them or something? throughout my life i have truly just had to count on myself to figure it out. applying to jobs, applying to schools, looking for places to live, paying taxes, etc.

sometimes i feel like everyone else in the world has a little antenna and is receiving instructions on how to live and i am just alone and confused. alienated. and you may say "just google it." maybe we don't have the same google... or maybe i just have no clue how to use google. but every time i try to find actual useful information for my life on google, it's always a millions results and i don't feel like any of them have viable answers for me. which leads me to my next point.

once i noticed it, the more i see it. people taking the most basic and bare bones advice and repackaging it as something new and the oversimplification of problems. ummm, you did not reinvent the wheel sis, i know that i need to drink water for healthier skin but it's not gonna solve all my problems.

or just straight up misinformation. you have to go through 1,000 people telling you what's good for you to get to 1 person telling you the truth. but the problem is that i have no idea who is telling me the truth. everyone has their own motives and most people are only trying to help themselves.

that being said, let me share something i do know, maybe someone like me will read this. not likely but anyways.

my beloved skin routine. now, i will say i do have nice skin but it's not exactly a family thing, some of my siblings had a lot of acne and some had very little. i have been taking care of my skin since before i even hit puberty so i feel that i can attribute some of my current situation to that. i get a lot of compliments on my skin. also i would like to note that i have no medical knowledge of this subject it is all anecdotal. but anyways, let's get into it.

remove makeup, if wearing any. there are multiple approaches to this. if your skin is more oily i would recommend micellular water and if it's more dry then coconut oil. of course, anyone can try out either, depending on your skin's sensitivity one or the other might be better. but i would say be weary of using coconut oil if you are already very oily. these are my favorite makeup removers because they're effective, gentle, and somewhat cheap.

wash face. there are so many cleansers out there, it can be so overwhelming. my go to is the cetaphil daily facial cleanser. i prefer this over all of the other cetaphil cleansers, but if you need there is a gentler one. be thorough, really lather up your face and then add some water, continue to lather, add more water, lather, until the face wash is all off your skin.

dry... obvi! make sure you are cleaning your towels often enough, i would say to only use the same one for a week before cleaning it.

tone. this is actually a super important step. it feels so unnecessary but truly makes a big difference to me. put just enough on a cotton ball/pad or reusable cloth substitute to the point where it's wet but not dripping. then wipe around your face. dont get too close to your eyes, they will be more sensitive. using toner will help your other post-wash products work better. my favorite toner is the pixi clarity tonic.

serum. i loveee trying out different serums because more often than not they work well and make my skin feel super good and hydrated. while there are many serums that are supposedly directed at different skin issues, i honestly think that the main benefit is added moisture to your skin that you just can't get from a cream moisturizer. i put one drop on each cheek and maybe a tiny one on my nose and then massage it all in, making sure to get also get my neck. the serum i use right now is the pixi glow tonic serum. i also love the pixi hydrating milky mist.

moisturize. i feel like putting a cream moisturizer over your face after serum just locks in all the hydration. i recommend one with sunscreen, but be weary because i find that sometimes they are more oily than the moisturizers without. one that i have found to be perfect for me is the elf holy hydration moisturizer with sunscreen. i have used this one for two years now and i just keep buying it. it's not too light or too heavy. don't use too much moisturizer. i put a pea sized amount on each cheek, my nose, and my chin and then massage it all in. and again, dont forget your neck!

it's extremely important to be consistent. wash your face in the morning and at night. if something doesn't work for you, then try something else. and the more expensive options don't always mean better. recognize the patterns of what works for you and what doesn't. what kind of ingredients are in the products that you're sensitive to? perfecting your own skin routine can involve trying a lot of new things but when you find something that works, i would advice you to continue using that product until it no longer works for you. if it's not broke, dont fix it! also continually introducing new things to your skin can be counterintuitive. and do NOT pop your pimples!! the pimple gods will know what you did and will only bring you more pimples. although it is so hard sometimes because let's be honest sometimes it feels super embarrassing and pimples can look a little gross, but you just have to ignore it. put a pimple patch on it and forget about it.

that's pretty much it for today. it was my sister's birthday, i think she liked my present but it's hard to tell with her. i'm ready for bed. it's been a long day. goodnight, void.

[artificialqueens]

Whenever I’m Alone With You (Tia/Veronica) - Juno

Summary: Tia and Veronica take an eventful day trip to the seaside. They start the day as friends. Will that be the case by the end of the day?

(A/N: It’s taken me a little while but I’m finally happy with this so here is some Greentia for anyone who wants DRUK stuff. No CWs it’s mostly fluffy with some h/c. I hope you enjoy.)

Brighton was supposed to be well-known for having the best beaches in the UK. Student city? Sure. Queer-friendly? Yes. But the beach? Mostly stones. Stones as far as the eye could see along the coastline.

Disappointing, Tia thought to herself as she leaned against the intricate Victorian iron fence surrounding the beach. I expected white sand and palm trees from the way the uni welcome pack hyped it up. I’ll give it a four out of ten.

Still, the seaside was alright. It almost felt like being back in Clacton. The usual fairground rides, a Ferris wheel, the pier out over the sea littered with people, and seagulls brave enough to steal your wallet let alone your chips.

It was October and for some reason it was sunny and warm this Saturday, and Tia had come to the seaside to relish what would probably be the last warm-ish day of the year. What seemed to be the entire population of East Sussex had also taken that view, and the beach was crowded with people chasing the last strands of summer sun.

Tia preferred to be here on the pavement above the beach, breathing in the salty sea air, and listening to the waves, wondering how something so forceful sounded so peaceful.

“Nice day.”

Veronica’s soft voice behind her served as a reminder that Tia wasn’t alone.

Out of her three new housemates, Veronica hadn’t been Tia’s first choice in wanting someone to spend the day at the seaside with, but Aurora and Ellie had already gone out. They’d only lived in their halls for just over a month, but Aurora and Ellie were already almost joined at the hip, spending all day together when they weren’t in lectures.

There were four of them on their floor of the halls, all women. Tia had instantly bonded with Ellie, who bubbled with fun and was most content when she was making people laugh. It had taken a little longer to get to know Aurora, who was hard as nails but whose loyalty to her friends was endless. And then there was Veronica. Veronica had avoided most of the freshers’ social activities, barely leaving her room, and in doing so, became something of a loner.

She’d asked Veronica to go with her out of politeness, but also out of some vague fascination with her. Tia knew they were friends - if the last month had shown them anything, they were definitely friends - but she didn’t know enough about Veronica to know if it would be a fleeting friendship or a lasting one.

After all, Tia thought to herself as she watched Veronica getting black lipstick all over the cone, we don’t really have much in common on the surface.

“Yeah, it’s a really nice day,” Tia nodded at her finally, taking another lick of the ice cream Veronica had bought her.

The quiet resumed between them; not an uncomfortable sound, Tia noticed, but one that simply didn’t need to be filled with noise. It made a change from Ellie, always game for a laugh, and Aurora, who had an opinion to give on everything. But Tia liked the quiet time they shared. The only sound was the rush of the sea, and Veronica humming some tune that Tia recognised vaguely, but not enough to know.

There was a clatter as Veronica’s parasol dropped to the ground beside her. Veronica smiled apologetically as she leaned to pick it up. Tia knew some people with some - interesting fashion choices, but Veronica was the only person she knew with an actual parasol, black like the rest of her outfit.

“Do you always wear black?” Tia asked.

Veronica’s huff and rehearsed reply said it all. “Yes, I always wear black, I sleep in a coffin, and it’s Halloween every bloody day.”

“I mean - don’t you get really warm in summer?”

Veronica seemed to consider the question. “Not really. The skirt is quite thin material, and -“

“But it’s all black.”

“So?”

“Well, it traps heat,” Tia said.

Veronica looked down at herself, cocking an eyebrow, turning back to look at Tia. “Yeah, I suppose so. At least I look, you know, hot.”

Tia blinked at Veronica, who held her gaze expectantly.

“No, sorry, Vee, that was just crap. That was such a bad dad joke.” Tia shook her head in exasperation. “Honestly! I thought goths were meant to be funnier than that.”

Veronica sighed. “Yeah, well, me too.”

Her contemplative stare out to the sea was evidently meant to be intense, but no one, not even someone as goth as Veronica, could ever look too intense while eating an ice cream.

“Is that why you bought me an ice cream in the first place?” Tia asked, still teasing, trying to coax Veronica to open up a little more. “Were you trying to make up for your dad jokes in advance?”

Veronica managed a smile. “Partly. And - partly to say thanks for sticking up for me last night.”

Last night. Tia cringed internally.

“Yeah, well,” Tia muttered, shuffling uncomfortably. “You were homesick. You didn’t need that.”

Veronica’s stare was fixed on the horizon as she continued. “I … don’t think I realised how homesick I would be.”

“It’s normal, Vee. You’re not - you don’t have to put on a hard front just because you like wearing black; you’re allowed to be emotional too. It’s not like the rest of us haven’t been homesick as well.” Tia gave her a nudge in the shoulder. “You saw me bawling about it, didn’t you?”

——

All it had taken for Tia to get homesick was for that Doja Cat song to come on Tia’s shuffle while she was waiting for the kettle to boil.

It was Thursday morning, the week after lectures started, and Tia was already feeling like shit. The reality that she was here to study had kicked in, and she’d spent half the night awake worrying about her first assignment. But when the song had come on, Tia had been instantly flooded with the memory of her mum attempting that TikTok dance with her, falling about in laughter when she’d failed. That had been enough for Tia to break down, sobbing so hard that she didn’t have the energy to finish making her cup of tea.

Aurora hadn’t come home the previous night, spending the night at Tayce’s halls after Wicked Wednesdays at the union bar, and Ellie’s 8.15 lecture had already started; so Tia knew that when she heard a creaking of the door in the hallway that it would be Veronica.

“What’s up, love?” She’d whispered cautiously, but Tia had just cried harder at her words, so she’d simply rubbed her back and shoulders and made her a brew as Tia had tried to stop crying.

“D’you miss your mum?” Veronica had asked, peering up at her in concern, Tia’s free hand clasped tenderly in both of hers.

“I’m sorry, I’m being stupid,” Tia had managed to mumble through her tears.

“Don’t say that, you’re not being stupid at all,” Veronica had soothed, looping her hand into the crook of Tia’s elbow. “Tell you what, come into my room and we’ll put on a film, eh?”

“I - I have a lecture at 11 -“

“You’re not going anywhere, someone will get you the notes.”

Tia was surprised at how determined Veronica was to take care of her, pulling her into her immaculately tidy room and setting the tablet up with Netflix. She hadn’t expected Veronica’s first choice in a comfort film to be Finding Nemo, or for Veronica to toss the blankets over both of them and curl up next to Tia, handing her tea and the pack of Hobnobs that she’d only bought the day before.

They didn’t really speak at all.

Tia felt herself calm down gradually, laughing and tearing up at the film, passing biscuits back and forth with Veronica, sharing the progression of emotions with her as they came and went.

It was a depth of care that Tia felt to her bones.

Not that the other two girls on their floor would have been bad company. She knew that Aurora would have given her a hug and a peck on the cheek, told her she was amazing and she was smashing it and how much she herself was feeling the pressure of being away from home too. She knew that Ellie would have cracked a few jokes and tried to make her laugh, maybe telling her a funny story of something she’d seen Aurora do, or one of the scores of new friends she’d already made.

They both would have tried to be helpful in the best and most loving way they knew how.

But Tia wouldn’t have been able to take in encouragement from Aurora, and she didn’t want to laugh even if Ellie had succeeded in making her.

Somehow Veronica knew that Tia didn’t need someone to make noise for the sake of noise. She didn’t need hugs. She just needed … company. She just needed someone there to be with her.

“Thanks, Vee,” Tia had said finally, unable to meet Veronica’s eyes. “I - I feel a lot better now.”

“It’s alright,” Veronica had murmured, threading her fingers into Tia’s and squeezing. “Come back any time.”

——

“What made you want to come to Brighton?” Veronica asked, breaking into Tia’s memories.

They had moved to a free spot on the beach itself, sitting on a towel under Veronica’s parasol - seriously, why did she have a parasol? - the heat now starting to break as the evening drew in. Tia was taking a swig from her bottle of water, while Veronica was digging into the sand with her hands, pulling up handfuls and letting the grains slip through her fingers.

Tia shrugged in response. “The course. Being by the coast. Lesbians. The usual.”

“Oh.” Veronica stifled a laugh. “Like me then. The usual.”

The forced nonchalance of her tone made Tia snort with laughter.

“Where are you from again?” Tia asked her.

“Lancashire. Took five hours for my dad to drive me down here last month. Five bloody hours.” Veronica held up five fingers as if she hadn’t given enough emphasis already. “I wanted to come here for a bit of a fresh start, I suppose. No one I know from school went this far south. I thought maybe I’d have - I don’t know. A reinvention. A renaissance, fitting on my History course, eh?”

“Yeah,” Tia nodded.

“But you can’t shake off the old habits,” Veronica muttered darkly.

“What do you mean?”

“People - just thinking I’m stuck-up.” Veronica sighed, digging back into the sand. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

——

The previous night had been tense. Aurora’s friend Tayce had asked about the roommate who never seemed to leave her room, and Aurora had groaned an exaggerated groan, running her hands through her hair.

“I’m so sick of Veronica’s martyr act,” Aurora had declared at the sound of Veronica’s name, her voice ringing in the kitchen and through the open doorway to the hall.

“Don’t be stupid,” Tia had said, nudging Aurora in the ribs. “She’s not a martyr.”

“She is. She’s playing the martyr. I mean, she’s nice when you speak to her,” Aurora had shrugged, “but she doesn’t really want to talk to us, does she? She doesn’t make an effort, it’s always us making the effort with her. Like she’s too good for us. We’re just normal and she’s special just because she likes some bloody moody bands from the eighties.”

Tayce had raised her eyebrows, grinning her usual wolfish grin and sniggering silently behind her hand.

“She doesn’t think she’s special,” Tia had retorted, but Aurora had just rolled her eyes.

“It annoys me. People like her want to be different but they are all the same as each other. They want to conform to show that they don’t conform. How does that make sense? She just wants the attention.”

That was when they’d all heard the door slam.

“Good going, Aurora,” Tia had hissed. “She must have heard you.”

Aurora had chewed her tongue nervously, a flush creeping up her neck, but she stood her ground. “Whatever. I’m not wrong, am I?”

“You are wrong, actually,” Tia had replied, her voice suddenly louder than Aurora’s, “because you just don’t give her the chance. She’s not playing anything. She’s just - I don’t know, shy. And missing her home. And I bet you’re not making it any easier for her to feel like she can come talk to you. Leave her alone.”

Tayce’s sniggers had become too loud to cover up, and she turned to bury her face into Aurora’s shoulder. Aurora, her face now red as a tomato, had chewed her lips and shaken her head in exasperation.

“Whatever.”

With that, she’d swept away to her own room, Tayce on her heels. Tia had hung back, remembering Veronica’s kindness towards her, knowing that she was probably going through it as well. Ellie and Aurora had both had tough days, too. They all had.

Tia had stopped outside Veronica’s room and knocked gently at her door.

“Vee?”

But Veronica didn’t answer initially. Tia knew it was wrong to barge in, but she’d found the door unlocked.

“I’m opening the door - tell me to go - or I’m coming in -“

But Veronica had called “Come in” in the smallest voice, and Tia pushed the door open.

Veronica was curled on her side on the bed, staring at the wall, tracing the paint on it with her finger. When Tia had pushed the door closed and sat on the bed next to Veronica, she could see that her face was red and patchy and her eyes bloodshot.

“Is that really what they all think? That I’m an attention-seeker?”

Her voice had broken as she spoke. She rolled onto her back to face Tia, searching her eyes for honesty, and Tia thought she seemed as angry as she was upset at the way she had been spoken about.

Tia had shaken her head. “I don’t think that. I think -”

I think you’re really lovely.

The words wouldn’t come out, and Tia realised that they went deeper than she’d previously thought. But Veronica’s eyes had softened, and she’d laid her hand on Tia’s, almost as if she’d heard her thoughts. “Thank you.”

——

“They’re nice, you know, Aurora and Tayce are,” Tia replied, and Veronica looked up at her. “Just - I don’t know - don’t be scared of them.”

“Aurora’s got some preconceived idea about me because of how I look.”

“Okay, but you do too,” Tia sighed. “You think Aurora and Tayce won’t want to talk to you because they’re the coolcrowd. I get it, I feel like that too sometimes. But Aurora just takes a bit of time to get to know, and trust me, she’s just tough for show; she’s really sweet and caring underneath it all. Like you,” Tia added.

“I guess.” Veronica muttered.

“I mean - you’re right, things don’t just change when you move away, you have to make them change.”

Veronica huffed.

“You know I’m right,” Tia said.

“Yeah, I do. Sorry.” She shrugged dismissively. “Dad always tells me off for being stubborn. Maybe Aurora had a point.”

A seagull landed dangerously near to Veronica, and she kicked out at it. When it didn’t immediately fly away, Tia sat up on her knees and waved a hand, until it scurried away to a safe distance.

“This place is giving me lots of Clacton vibes.” Tia stretched out her legs again. “My mum used to take me there every summer, and it’s the same as here! Some sand, some chips in a cone, seagulls shitting everywhere, a few rides, you get the idea.”

“Rides?” Veronica spun to Tia at that word, her eyes lighting up suddenly. “I didn’t know if you liked rides! Do you want to go on a ride on the pier? Or the Ferris wheel or something? Is there a waltzer? I love the waltzers, oh my God -“

“I don’t know, do I! I’ve only lived here for as long as you have!”

But Tia couldn’t have resisted the spark of joy that came to Veronica’s face if she’d tried, holding back laughter at Veronica’s sudden burst of enthusiasm. She got up and pulled Veronica to her feet, and Veronica hooked a hand through Tia’s arm in what was becoming a wonderfully familiar gesture, to pull her along the seafront towards the pavilion and the amusement arcade.

“Waltzers!” Veronica cried, squeezing Tia’s arm and pointing at the waltzers fifty yards away. She dragged Tia towards them with surprising strength for such a tiny woman.

But Tia was worried. Is this the time to mention I’ve never been on them? That I hate spinning round and round?

“Am I gonna vom?” Tia asked nervously. “I don’t want to vom. Do they spin you?”

“Yeah, they do, but you won’t puke, promise.”

“You sure?” Tia eyed the waltzer, but Veronica nodded earnestly.

“Yeah, I’m sure. My brother gets car sick and he loves the waltzers too, come on, you’ll be fine.”

Partly, Tia was watching the other people in the booths shrieking with delight as they spun in their booths, but mostly, she saw a happy side to Veronica that she hadn’t seen a great deal of, and found she wanted to experience it with her.

Things don’t just change when you move away, you have to make them change.

“Alright, I’m coming on.”

The next three minutes were a blur. A fast, dizzying blur. Tia just remembered screaming until her throat hurt and clinging onto the bar for dear life as she leaned into Veronica, who screeched loud enough to wake the actual dead, the g-force sticking them to each other and the back of the booth like glue.

But it was so fun that Tia wanted to go again.

“Vee,” Tia muttered, as they stepped back off, “I’m covered in your nail marks, hun.” She showed Veronica her forearm, where her nails had dug in, leaving tiny crescent-moon indents in her skin.

Veronica grimaced. “Sorry. Can I make it up to you?”

“Another ice cream?”

“I was thinking of Spoons.” Veronica pointed to the pub on the seafront. “It’s getting too cold here now for ice cream.”

——

The sun had set and the seafront had a definite chill in the air as Tia and Veronica sat together on the terrace outside Spoons. They watched the people around them as they passed, the ride operators for the kids rides as they packed away, and the daytime folk, as a handful of teenagers started to appear, getting on the rides themselves.

The rush of the waves as the tide crept in, and Veronica’s persistent humming, filled the space between them. Veronica had shuffled her chair right next to Tia’s, and the song was irritatingly familiar, but Tia couldn’t quite remember it.

“What is that song you keep humming?” Tia asked Veronica finally.

“Oh - nothing.” Veronica swallowed hard.

“Really?” Tia grinned at her. “Is it The Cure or something?”

“Yeah - yeah, it’s The Cure.” Veronica said quickly. “Disintegration. Great album.”

“It sounds like it,” Tia nodded, secretly hoping she’d never have to be subjected to it. Veronica fell completely silent after that, a little self-conscious, and Tia felt a little uncomfortable for the first time that day.

“That woman’s the fortune teller at the Pavillion,” Tia motioned as she passed, trying to ease the tension. “Tayce got her palm read by her at freshers’ week. She thought Tayce was from Yorkshire! She couldn’t even read her mind and see she’s Welsh!”

“Fortune telling?” Veronica shook her head. “Just a cheap trick, cold reading more like.”

“I can do it! Give me your hand and I’ll show you.”

Tia took Veronica’s nearest hand that lay on the table, and pulled it towards her. Veronica shuffled in even closer, leaning into Tia’s arm. She was much shorter than Tia, her chin only just resting on Tia’s shoulder, and Tia found her warm weight more distracting than she thought she would.

“So,” Tia mused, stroking her thumb slowly down Veronica’s palm, “this line here, that’s your life line, this long one here in the middle of your palm. See it?”

Veronica didn’t speak, but she gave a hum of agreement, her lips perking at the corners into a dreamy smile. Tia caught a hint of the surprisingly light floral perfume she wore, a vague scent of apple from her hair.

“This line here,” Tia mumbled, rapidly losing her train of thought, running a thumb along the palm of Veronica’s hand. “This line, it’s - your life line. I said that already. Erm. It means that you … spend your life … in lines. All sorts of lines. Lines for rides, lines at the shop, Tube lines -“

“Give over.” Veronica sounded almost a little disappointed. She took another swig of her drink, almost draining the glass.

“Your love of lines has been exposed now, Vee. You can’t hide it any longer.”

To her surprise, Veronica was laughing.

“I like that you’ve given me a nickname. No one else does. It’s nice. Feels like …” Her eyes were pensive, and she shrugged, unable to think of a word. “I don’t know. But I like it.”

Veronica’s tone was light and airy, but Tia felt goosebumps spread on her neck and arms at the sound of her voice, and her chest fluttered, filled with sudden butterflies.

This moment felt pivotal, like a turning point.

Are we - catching feelings?

Sure, Veronica was interesting enough, and kind - if a little stubborn - and every time they had been alone together, they seemed to have an instinctual connection that Tia couldn’t explain. But it felt quite fast, and still, Tia wasn’t quite sure what Veronica was feeling for her.

After all, Tia thought to herself, I’m just a maths nerd who makes crap jokes sometimes.

“And this line …” Tia moved her thumb up over Veronica’s palm, “this is the … the Bakerloo line and it means … there is maintenance over the weekend so plan your journey well in advance.”

Veronica nearly choked on the mouthful of her drink, instantly breaking the spell. “That makes no sense at all! Anyway, I’m more interested in this one,” Veronica added, putting down her glass and pointing, “that’s the love line. I know that much. What does that one say?”

“I was just getting to that one. Save the best for last and all.” Tia feigned exasperation as Veronica’s face grew more and more red even under her makeup.

“Your love line is here,” Tia began, looking back at Veronica, staring enraptured at her hand in Tia’s, her smile a mile wide. “And it says that … you … I don’t know, you’re going to meet a tall, beautiful stranger.”

Tia meant that to be casual, but Veronica curled her fingers around the thumb that was still stroking her palm, and gave it a squeeze.

“Alright,” she said softly, “maybe palm reading isn’t all bollocks.”

——

Tia found that she hadn’t wanted Veronica to let go of her hand.

Luckily, Veronica didn’t seem to want to let go, either.

Tia wasn’t the biggest fan of physical contact, and she hadn’t thought Veronica was either, until this evening, as they walked home, hand in hand this time, after the wine was drained. One glass of wine each wasn’t enough to make either of them drunk, but both of them were light and happy, even as they got back to the halls.

“Thanks for asking me to come with you,” Veronica said, her smile lighting up the rest of her face.

“Vee, you don’t have to thank me. You’re … I don’t know.” Tia sighed. “It was a fun day.”

The hallway was quiet and dark. Ellie and Aurora were still out evidently, and in the half-light, Tia was conscious that Veronica still had her hand, a gesture that felt so familiar and so exposed for them both.

Tia cleared her throat. “Alright. Night then.”

Veronica nodded. “Night, Tia.”

Neither of them moved.

Tia hadn’t really noticed before how intense Veronica’s stare was, or how bright blue her eyes were underneath the layers of black eyeliner; but she felt it now even though it was getting dark; and it felt like Veronica was trying to tell her something, drawing her into her eyes.

Wait. This is uni. There’s no going home after a day out. We live here together. We can do what we want.

“I mean -“ Tia shifted from one foot to another. “We don’t have lectures tomorrow, it’s Sunday isn’t it? Or are you tired, do you want to get to sleep?”

“No, I’m not tired - what - what did you have in mind?”

“Finding Dory this time?”

“Can do,” Veronica tilted her head as if pondering the idea. “Yeah. You set up, I’ll take my makeup off.”

Within fifteen minutes they were both in their pyjamas, curled up together in Tia’s bed this time, passing Veronica’s Hobnobs between them. The tablet played Finding Dory, balanced on Tia’s knees. The night had turned colder and Tia had insisted on Veronica bundling under the covers with her.

Tia left her hand out of the covers, in full view, and Veronica took the cue, grabbing her hand and interlacing their fingers. The film didn’t last long before Tia became distracted by Veronica running her thumb over Tia’s knuckles, as if in a dream, not even looking at the screen any more.

As the film came to an end, Tia realised she barely remembered the plot at all. She and Veronica had curled into one another, Tia’s head resting on Veronica’s, still clasping her hand. They didn’t move, Tia feeling their breathing fall into rhythm, until she felt Veronica’s deepening and realised it was pretty late.

“Are you tired, Vee?” Tia whispered.

Veronica hummed, stretching out her legs and yawning. “Yeah, a bit. I should go to bed.”

Tia missed the warmth of Veronica from the bed, the steady weight of her hand, from the moment she’d slipped from under the covers; but she followed her out, getting up to go to the door and lock it.

“Well. Night, Tia.”

Veronica reached to hug Tia, who had to bend to reach her, being a good eight or nine inches taller than Veronica. But when the hug lasted much longer than expected, Tia didn’t complain.

Nor did she find it strange when she felt Veronica’s lips softly graze her cheek, right by her ear. It wasn’t a familiar, friendly kiss. It was curious, testing the waters, wondering if this was really happening.

Tia’s heart fluttered when she returned the kiss, again on Veronica’s cheek, as if to answer the question.

But when Veronica pulled away, her eyes were fearful all of a sudden, and she seemed to lose her nerve, spinning round to make a quick exit, slipping away without another word.

Tia locked the door, now humming the tune that Veronica had been humming all day to herself.

It isn’t The Cure. I know it too. God, what is it?

Tia had to hum a few more bars to herself before she finally recognised it, and started singing the chorus to herself.

‘I wanna ruin our friendship, we should be lovers instead.’

God, Tia thought to herself, not just me then.

[allonsy-yesiwill]

Small Town Friday Night

WC:1869

Pairing: Jensen x Reader 

Warnings: drinking too much, falling down...kind of like me on a Friday night ...sorry not sorry.  A/N: so I wanted to some fluffy drabble but I guess I am allergic...so this is like 99% fluff and like 1% angst. It’s also my first Jensen work, I started out with Dean but I couldn’t see him being this soft. Please note soft is not bad.  It’s not super edited...cause I ain't got time for that...sorry. 

Oh man, what a week. You are so ready for it to be over. The only thing you are doing tonight is going to the bar getting some food and falling asleep early tonight. You don’t even care what everyone is going to say. 

You get to the bar and see all of the normal people, getting ready for the weekend shenanigans. You sit down and talk to all of your friends, going over the week you just head and that everyone is happy it’s behind us. 

Needed a refill you walk up to the bar, taking a seat, not in a rush. You can see your friend K is busy and you have all of the time in the world. You aren’t sure how you missed this perfect specimen of a man, based on look only, that you sat next to. However the bartender did not and she was making eye contact with you that told you, you were either sitting next to someone awesome or some sort of evil monster, so you look. 

“Hey,” is all he says and damn his voice is sweet but confident. 

I say a little prayer before I ask a question, please please don’t be douchey, please. “Hey, how is your Friday?” 

The casual conversation continues, he’s here cause a friend purchased a home in the oceanfront town. He’s doing to doing some reinventing of it for the next few months and maybe be a caretaker after that. His name is Jensen, and you can tell that his story has got more pain then he wants to share on a Friday night. So you don’t pressure him. More than once when he’s talking you find yourself lost in his eyes, to be fair you have completely forgotten about your friends. 

“Oya Y/L/N, what are you doing? Are we getting food?” Kevin hollers walking up. 

“Oh yeah, I forgot.” Kevin just gives me a shit eating grin that says, “you forgot, is that what we are calling it now.” 

“Jensen this is Kevin, Kevin this is Jensen. Kevin just moved back to town and he is a bit of trouble, like out till 3 am, you may wake up in your car or somewhere else. So just consider yourself warned.” 

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” Kevin let’s out with a laugh, “ So yeah food, we all need it, lets go next door. I want tots.” 

“I told you Brian doesn’t like it when you call him that,” I say with a smile. 

“We will see about that, Jensen are you going with us?”

“Sure, I wouldn’t mind a little trouble tonight.” 

“What about a lot, I don’t have anything in small sizes today,” Kevin says as we walk over. 

The night continues on and well, going home earlier is not a thing. You are having a great time with everyone including your new friend Jensen. After dinner, your group moves to the outdoor area where this is sofa seating and big chairs along with a hammock. The temp is just right, and the stars are out thanks to the new moon. 

After some time you find yourself sitting next to Jensen and you aren’t mad about it. Clearly, your friends see that there is something happening between the two of you so they do every to make it more awkward for you. 

“Move over Y/L/N,” Kevin calls coming back looking for a seat. 

“Um no, sit on the ground.” 

“No fire ants, why do you have to be so difficult. Look either his lap or mine you choose,” Kevin says and if looks could kill he would be dead. 

“Good Sir, do you mind?” Kevin asks Jensen as he’s in the process of picking you up. 

“I can’t say no to a beautiful lady.” 

Yup, I am going to kill Kevin, probably with my car. 

After you were placed on his lap, Jensen moved over a bit so that your ass was somewhat on the sofa and just your legs were over his lap. “Is this okay, I mean I can just move and you can sit here,” Jensen whisper.  “No it’s fine, if we change it up there will be more jokes and I think it’s best we  just pull up right now.” 

As the night continues drinks continue to flow, you had already tried to leave 3 times however were offered rides home so you stayed. You are still sitting on Jensen’s lap, with no complaints. He hand has moved throughout the night and is now resting on your lower back, again no complaints. Till well you realize that you have to pee. “I gotta use pee” you softly whisper before you start moving on his lap. He gives you a hand to help you get up and smiles as you walk away. 

There is a small line, but you don’t care you run into a friend that you haven’t see for a while so you are chatting it up. There are picnic tables outside of a few steps that walk up into the restroom outdoors. It’s your turn so you get up and head into the restroom. Looking at yourself in the mirror, you feel amazing. You look cute and are having a great night, you could practically skip back to your group. 

The idea of skipping is probably what did it, walking down the steps you felt it. Your ankle rolling. When you are on the ground didn’t even blink and Kevin, Brian, and Jensen were all there. Yup, not what you wanted to happen. 

Kevin’s the first to say anything, “ What do you need, a ride home, ice, a new drink?” A smile is all you can muster all you really want to do it bury your head in the sand. Kevin has your shoe off and is touching different point on your ankle to make sure that nothing requires a hospital. 

“Y/N, you okay,” Brian asked. 

“I will be,” you answer and he smiles and takes your cup getting you a new drink. 

Jensen has pulled up a plastic chair next to you and is sitting down next to you. “You okay there, princess?”

“Yup, just fall down a lot.”  

“Yeah she doesn't it’s her superpower,” Kevin joked, “It looks like it will hurt a bit tomorrow but nothing long term or that requires a doctor.” 

“Well good I will just continue to be me and fall down more,” I joke. 

“Or maybe not,” Kevin says coming over and placing a kiss on my forehead, “I will be back with ice.” 

“So if you are going to keep this falling down act up, I might have to start following you around,” Jensen said with a smug smile. 

“Why is that? Looking to capture the opposite of grace on film?”

“No, but someone should probably catch you.” 

You can’t help but laugh. “That was pretty good, pick-up-line to use on someone who falls a lot, you get it?” 

It’s Jensens turn to laugh now. The puns and jokes continue for about another 45 mins. It’s now 2 am and Brian is closing the bar. There was a group that was going to head to one last stop for some food, Kevin was talking to them about driving you home and then circling back around to meet up with them. 

“Hey Kevin, I can totally take her home. It’s not a problem,” Jensen says when Kevin comes over. Kevin gave me a look, like is that okay? I smile as if to say why not. 

“Okay Jensen, but here is the thing, if she is damaged any more than she currently is you will be paying for all of the repairs. It’s a small town and I know everyone. We can make you disappear, “ Kevin says shaking Jensen’s hand. 

Kevin walked over to me, “Okay, text me when you get home. You still have that switchblade on you right Y/N, you know just in case.” 

“I am good, have a good night we will talk tomorrow.”  

“Be good kids, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,”  Kevin yelled walking out the door. 

Jensen helped Brian close everything up and then he pulled his car around the front for me to climb in. Just my like it was a truck, not super big but four-wheel drive so I was going to struggle a bit. I try climbing in and I hear Jensen yell, “Hey hey, wait a second.” So I freeze where I am at. When he gets around to that side of the car he doesn’t even blink just picks you up and places you on the seat, helping twist your legs to face forward. 

The ride home was quiet, you can feel the heaviness of the liquor and tonight's events weighing on you as you are trying to keep your eyes open You hadn't even realized that you had fallen asleep till you heard Jensen whispering in your ear about him picking you up and taking you inside. 

“Wait how did you find my place if I was asleep?” 

“Well, sleeping beauty I called Kevin.”

“Hmm that makes sense,” you say borrowing your face into his chest. You can feel him chuckle. 

After he gets you in bed and strips your shoes off, he leans over and kisses your forehead wishing you sweet dreams. Before he can reach the door you let out, “ Stay.” 

“Ah I would love to but we kinda just met and.” 

You cut him off, “ Please I am going to fall asleep in like 10 sec,” you say standing up and unbuttoning your jeans. “ Having you next to me relaxes me and, and I just haven’t had that in more than a minute.” You turn your back to him to take off your bra and climb back into bed. Knowing he’s had enough time to respond, you just assume he’s not that into you or that idea or anything. So you decide to let him off the hook, “ Look, Jensen, it’s no big deal. I...I, well just forget I asked. I am just drunk and tired.”  It’s everything you can do to hold back the tears. You can feel them in the corners of your eyes you can feel the weight on your chest. “Thanks for the ride, have a good night,” you try to say it as softly as you can but your voice still cracks. 

You hear nothing, you’ve already rolled over to face the wall so you can’t see him. But nothing, the door didn’t close. There were no footsteps, just nothing. You can’t help but take in a heavy breath to try and calm your emotions.

“Sweetie, I can’t think of anything more I would like to do.” You hear footstep, him walking closer, shoes coming off pants unbuckling. He climbs into bed in his underwear and tee, wrapping you in his arms pulling you close, “ Did you have a good night?” 

“I did, there was a cute boy there and I think he might like me too.” 

“Hmm that’s a great story, you will have to tell me how it ends tomorrow morning over breakfast. Good night Y/N, sweet dreams.” 

Let me know what you think, I haven’t really been writing that much but I am hoping to get back into it 

[sportsgeekonomics]

BEWARE THE NCAA OKEY-DOKE on NIL!

I read this article last week  by Dennis Dodd (https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/mark-emmert-open-to-student-athletes-earning-money-off-their-likeness-but-fails-to-recognize-the-urgency/)and it reminded me of something everyone should always remember: BEWARE THE NCAA OKEY-DOKE! 

Dodd quoted Mark Emmert as saying:

 "We've talked to the congressman and tried to understand his position," Emmert said in his annual state of the union address at the Final Four. "There is very likely to be in the coming months even more discussion about the whole notion of name, image and likeness [and] how it fits into the current legal framework.

"Similarly, there needs to be a lot of conversation about how, if it was possible, how it would be practical. Is there a way to make that work? Nobody has been able up with a resolution of that yet."

This is one of the oldest NCAA tricks there is, which is to address something on the surface but not really change.  As an example, look at the SAAC, which is a sort of fake union the NCAA set up to fend off past efforts to unionize college athletes.  Or the Student Assistance Fund, which is designed to provide money to really poor athletes so their lack of proper clothing isn’t an embarrassment to the NCAA or a vehicle for people to argue that athletes deserve to earn what they are worth.  In NCAA logic, if you solve the symptom (athletes have no outlet, athletes have no winter coats) you can avoid solving the problem (athletes have no SAY, athletes have no RIGHT to earn their worth so they can afford a coat).  This is just more of the same.

Here you have Emmert saying they are open to allowing NILs but then claiming to not know how to do it.  Since the basic idea behind NIL rights is pretty simple: stop preventing athletes from signing contracts with endorsers, the "no one knows how” misdirection is a tell that they don’t want to actually give athletes their rights, but instead they would like to give them a sop they can claim is close enough.  I would wager a large chunk of change that the NCAA version of NIL rights would be something like this:

If someone wants to commercialize his/her image, they submit a permission request to an NCAA committee or quasi-independent group (perhaps headed by Condi Rice again) which assesses the market rates for a person with a comparable Q score [and most college athletes will have a very low Q score outside of their college town] and then put a cap on the dollar amount that third party can pay that athlete.  And if it so happens the third party has donated money to the athletes’ school, then it will either be forbidden outright or further curtailed.  

It won’t be a market – it will be a Politburo. 

And the thing is, almost surely, for the vast majority of athletes, the business that would want to tap into their (local) star power to sell products would be the sort of business already sponsoring the sports teams at that school.  The Chevy dealer who wants the offensive linemen to come and pose in front of some pickup trucks looking beefy is already “the Official Truck of the Generic State Football Program.”  The local competitor to muscle milk who gives free product to the basketball team is also the company that wants those muscled basketball players to be in local ads, etc.

My caution is that every time you hear “but what’s the plan?” recognize that it an invitation to move away from the elegance and simplicity of a market into something centrally planned, and moreover that impulse is not designed to improve the system, but rather intentionally to harm it, to delay it, or perhaps even to eradicate it entirely. 

If I can make another prediction, I would wager you will eventually hear an NCAA person say “we want to make sure these are not FAKE NIL payments.”  And if you ask what fake means, they are not worried the business will offer $100 but then not pay, but rather they are worried the business will offer $1,000 when in the NCAA’s mind, $100 was the right amount.  The NCAA is worried about athletes getting too much, not too little.  Becasue in the bizarro world of the NCAA, getting more than the NCAA thinks you should is evidence of you being exploited.  Really.

Stepping out of bizarro world, can you think of a reason why Americans should be worried if a privately owned business decides, based on its own assessments, that paying a celebrity endorser is worth $x to them?  Or that there sshould ever be government or private trade organization intervention to say "no, no, no – that’s too much money to pay that person.  He/she isn’t worth that much-- you mustn’t exploit them by overpaying them.”

Let’s put it this way, if that IS how we want America to work, Mark Emmert is the first person I want this new system to scrutinize.

What they mean by fake is “we are worried that the NIL payments will function as a bundled payment for NIL and also playing services, since a lot of the sponsorship will come from people whose goal is not just to sell product but also to make their local team better.”

First off, as someone who believes that by and large and with limited exceptions (e.g., human organs), markets are the best means of allocating scarce resources, why should anyone care even if the goal is to make the local team better.   Every local car deal with a connection to a university will want to do that and if Alabama’s boosters care more than Troy’s boosters, then Alabama will have a better team (like that do now) and higher NIL earnings (like they don’t know).  The only difference will be the earnings of the young men and the taxes they pay the State of Alabama and the IRS.  I could on a long jag about how, no this won’t hurt competitive balance by making Alabama better than Troy, but I’ve done that before and you can read it all here: https://deadspin.com/the-competitive-balance-argument-against-paying-athlete-1576638830.

 But as an economist whose very first published paper was on valuing intangible IP (it’s about how to figure out the right real-world price for an imaginary sword in a computer game: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxM4wdtZ5uI-enRJZE5qTjFCVVk/view?usp=sharing ), I can assure you that any purchase/licensing of intangible IP rights like NIL is always a bundled purchase.  To the local car dealer in Tuscaloosa, of course the NIL rights of an offensive lineman are greater if he attends Alabama than if he goes to Troy.  And so if any local booster is seen trying as trying to improve Alabama football via NIL payments, I would argue that that’s just good business.  Is he going to sell more cars when he is sponsoring Alabama football and using a star recruit in his ads if Alabama goes 11-1 or 8-4?  And so any claim that someone on some committee can assess what portion of a free market offer between a willing buyer and a willing seller is “real” vs. “fake” that cannot assess the value of the athletes playing skill as part of “real” is not going to capture the full value.  Especially for athletes, where their skill is so inherently part of their commercial appeal (with a limited number of exceptions for athletes of rare charisma or physical beauty), how could an NCAA committee ever disentangle the complex economics of commercial appeal of a celebrity from the complex economics of the utilitarian value of an athlete to a team.

So (1)  it’s a fool’s errand even for a wise council aimed at the truth.

Amd (2) I doubt the NCAA’s goal is the truth so much as simply to depress payments b/c they fear if their athletes win the right to a market rate for their NIL they might start asking for the rest of their rights too.

And (3), why would we even want to interfere with the world’s best assessor of true market value – a vibrant market with many buyers and many sellers, operating without collusion among either side of the transaction?

If we need a plan to get the NCAA on board, I propose we use the plan that is already in place for figuring out how much of every school’s head coach’s radio gig is a payment for his radio charisma vs. a payment based on his coaching skills.  We should use that exact same plan for the athletes.  After all, we can tap into that same bureaucracy the NCAA uses to assess market offers for coaches and to separate out the real from the fake payments.

What’s that?  There is no plan to do that, we just let schools and radio shows and coaches negotiate in a marketplace?  Exactly!  And that’s also how much plan we need for the equivalent transactions for athletes.

As some people reading this know, I am part of a group trying to create a professional college basketball league, the HBL  (HBLeague.com).  We have a plan for how our athletes will be allowed to commercialize their NIL, and at core our extremely complex system boils down to: "you own your brand.  Go get an agent and make some money.”

Now it’s a tad more complex if they want to use HBL trademarks in the ad or get a group license with dozens of other players, etc., but even those complexities are easily solved.  For example, the NBA and the NFL and pretty much every professional team sport has sorted all of those rules out and it is a wheel the HBL did not need to reinvent, so we didn’t.  The only reason the NCAA doesn’t feel it can borrow from the existing solutions for how athletes can use their rights to maximize their brand value– and listen carefully – is because the NCAA DOES NOT WANT Athletes to maximize their brand value.  To the NCAA, the problem isn’t that a market WON’T determine the optimal payment level for each athlete, but that it WILL.  And that’s the last thing the NCAA wants because the NCAA is built on the idea that it can abrogate athletes rights for its own convenience and economic gain.

 This is not really about the amount of money, rather it is about economic rights.  If America is fine with a radio show providing “fake” salary to a football coach for doing a weekly radio show, as a way to supplement his income beyond what a state entity like a university can pay, then it should not be good public policy to take that same right away from the starting QB.  The QB is not less of an American than the coach.  And the system that works for the coach will work just as well for the QB.  Or else, as I said above, let’s start with Mark Emmert.  Let’s put the microscope on what the head of a non-profit organization based in Indianapolis should earn if we separate out the fake parts of his pay from the real.  I’d be happy to serve on that particular committee.  Heck, I’d do it for free, for the love of the game.

[accidentalrabbit]

TO MY STAR

(series)

Korea 2021

RANK: A

A-pairing: Seojoon x Jiwoo

Other character(s) i enjoyed: N/A

Overall review:

It's not terribly often that a show leaves me feeling more than thinking, because that's just who i am as a person, but there's something about To My Star, with its brief episodes, slick production, and uncomplicated storyline, that is hard to put into words. Let's try anyway.

The plot is basically just a strangers to roommates to lovers speedrun, with some light bribery and a dash of angst added to spice things up. Seojoon, a famous actor (and golden retriever of a human being), is now hiding from the paparazzi in a home owned by his agency's CEO, which is currently inhabited by renter and cynical chef Jiwoo.

Seojoon has an air of incautiousness, with bad habits and an incorrigible carefree attitude, immediately grating on Jiwoo's nerves. Jiwoo, for his part, does not make himself easy to get along with, seemingly always highly focused on his work and having no time for frivolous things. But (shocker, i know) the two of them slowly learn things about each other as they become more vulnerable: Seojoon has severe anxiety, and possibly PTSD from former experiences with the paparazzi, and Jiwoo recognizes when something is wrong almost immediately. Seojoon is also interested in learning more about cooking from Jiwoo, to reconnect with his childhood memories, and eventually the supposedly guarded Jiwoo is in love.

Our leads have excellent chemistry, and the actors do a great job with a story that is altogether fairly basic in terms of structure and predictability. Their relationship develops reciprocity, which i always love, and the image of Seojoon waiting for Jiwoo at the door is almost saccharine in its sweetness. Even when the relationship starts to collapse under the strain of their circumstances (Jiwoo's coworker accepts a bribe to reveal information about Seojoon, Jiwoo doesn't want to be in the spotlight, Seojoon doesn't want to hurt Jiwoo, etc.) their anguished care for one another is clear. And when they inevitably get back together, it feels like the audience has come back home, too.

Does To My Star have any deeper meaning? I don't think so, and i also don't know that it's necessary. I appreciate that all of its themes are right on the surface (the healing power of food, the trauma of fame, the relationship between past memory and present action, happiness over wealth, 'love conquers all,' etc.); it's as if the series itself has its heart on its sleeve. There is no pretense of the series being anything more than what it is. It's a comfort show.

I had a good time, but:

I wish the side characters had a bit more to them. The main couple is excellent, but when neither of them are onscreen it's hard to care about any of the people around them as more than plot elements or middling comic relief.

Character(s) entitled to financial compensation: N/A in a figurative sense, but i do think someone quite literally owes Jiwoo financial compensation? I’d need someone to run me a check before i started sharing my rented lodgings with a random celebrity. I wish a landlord would give me zero notice.

Conclusion: To My Star is very pretty television with a serviceable plot, solid lead characters, and great acting. You don't always need to reinvent the wheel; sometimes, simply doing everything well is sufficient to make a story stand out. This series is full of excellent domestic moments and just enough drama to help our boys along their path to romance. I love it. Let's see what the sequel does.

For another tale of restaurants and gay people, we'll be visiting Beef, Cupcakes and Him (2021) to ask the timeless question: If your food were more savory and affordable than your competitors', would bragging about it in an interview lead your former boss to break up your relationship?

[jodybensonsharp]

Jody Benson Sharp Don't Worry About Lead Generation Any Longer - Read This

Jody Benson Sharp Qualified tips provider. If you in business, it can be a challenge for you to find leads. However, getting leads is a crucial part of your business. When you have leads, you have possibilities. Here are some ways to generate quality leads for your business, so that you can turn those leads into happy customers.

You need to understand what lead values are. Not every lead would be appropriate for the marketing campaign that you are running. Be sure you figure out what leads you're targeting and don't waste time sending promotions to people that don't even care about them. You will increase your success and effectiveness.

Make sure you have unique leads. It is not difficult to get so involved in purchasing or obtaining leads in other manners that you forget that some of your leads may be duplicates. You'll end up with the same lead over and over again. Make sure each number of leads you target is unique to get the most exposure.

Use your phone to your advantage, and start making calls to figure out who requires your products. You may be surprised at how many sales you are able to generate this way. Someone will always want to buy what you are selling if it is a good product.

One thing you must do is to start and grow your "opt in" process for generating leads. You need a marketing newsletter or email marketing or mobile marketing plan for this. You can ask them to opt in on your website, through forums you've joined, blogs and in other places.

Jody Benson Sharp Most excellent service providerKnow your target market. When you understand the specific group that most needs the products or services you offer, you will be able to reach them more efficiently. For example, if you are trying to reach elderly customers, you have a better chance of generating leads if you avoid a skateboard shop.

Do not underestimate the power of customer referrals in lead generation. If you've got a well-established customer base to begin with, referrals should be simple and painless, because your happy customers will naturally refer their friends and family. As an added incentive, give them a discount for sending others your way and watch your leads grow exponentially!

You should think about running seminars for local businesses. If you are a landscaper, share your seasonal flower knowledge. Personal trainers can lecture on methods for staying fit when you work full-time. Are others able to benefit from your knowledge?

Look at your competitors to see what tactics they use to generate leads. You don't need to reinvent the wheel when you are going to market. Oftentimes, your competitors have already done the hard work for you. If you see them using certain tactics heavily, there's a good chance they are doing so because it works.

Jody Benson Sharp Proficient tips provider.Start a newsletter and send it out to your current clients. You can also send them to those who have brought in referrals in the past, and even people who just happen to live near you. If you make it concise and clear people will read it, and you might get some new leads.

No matter the budget, a focused plan can help with reach your goals. Once you start a campaign, be sure you watch over it to figure out what works and what will fail. Try to utilize the most cost-efficient strategies; this is particularly true if you have a limited amount of funds.

Never overlook or underestimate a lead source. You will have many avenues for gathering leads such as buying or self-gathering or even word-of-mouth. Always look at each avenue for validity. Buying leads can be a great way to jump start your efforts, but they may not be the same quality leads you gain from a targeted effort.

If you really want to bring in leads, you must pair up your website with social media as well. From Facebook to Twitter, you must be taking advantage of all avenues in order to generate leads. Try using diverse campaigns to understand what does works and what does not.

Jody Benson Sharp Qualified tips provider.Remember to consider your timing and not just your content. Great content will only be effective if it arrives to a lead at a time when they need it and will consider it carefully. When is the best time to market to your potential leads? Think about who you are marketing to in order to decide this.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to generate leads is through referrals for your services! Offering existing customers incentives for referrals, such as a certain amount of money discounted the next time they use your services, will let you have several leads quickly. It's a foolproof way to get new business!

A lot can be done with a small budget. The main thing is that you need to focus on your goals. You also need to make sure you use your planned strategy. Once those items are in place, then you can measure the results to figure out where your effort needs to be implemented.

Sign up for Google AdWords. These ads target potential customers who visit various websites across the Internet. The beauty of this is that you only have to pay when someone actually clicks on the link that leads to your site. Once you have them on your site, you can convert them to a paying customer.

Be sure that all of your campaigns drive people to very specific landing pages. For example, if you are a real estate agent marketing to newlyweds, make the landing page you link them to specific to their needs as a new couple. Don't just link people to the front page of your site!

Jody Benson Sharp Proficient tips provider.Now that you know some good ways to get leads, you can get started. Lead generation is an essential part of any business, so it is important to do some of the methods above every day. When you start generating enough quality leads, you will soon discover that your business starts to improve.

[wesleybates]

5 Tips for Creating More Effective Web Content

Content Marketing is a popular topic these days in the blogosphere. Content is still a hugely effective tool when it comes to Inbound Marketing.  However, large companies are finally starting to wise up to this and spending big portions of their marketing resources on Content Marketing.

So what does this mean for organizations with marketing budgets that aren’t the size of a small country’s GDP?  Don’t worry, there is still time.  Content marketing is about the long tail.  It is about engagement.  Huge corporations still struggle with this in a major way.

To be successful with content, you need to know what content to create, how to best to create it and how to use it to your advantage.

Let’s go ahead and assume that we all agree that content is important for successful inbound marketing.  Now what?  I am going to give you 5 tips for using content to drive traffic, improve conversion, build a presence, and be successful with your online marketing.

Tip One – IDENTITY

Know yourself and what you do.  Seems simple right?  Sure it is.  But, have you taken the time to write this out?  Do you know your own story?  How does it read?

Before you can start churning out all of this great content for your web site, Blog, or social media outlets, you better know who you are talking to and what you need to say.  To figure this out I suggest you start with a little creative writing.

Take 30 minutes with a blank page and start writing.  Answer the following questions:

Who are you?

What is your history?

What do you do today?

What makes you different from your competition?

Who cares?

Don’t take too long to write this, just the facts, keep it simple.  We are looking for the essence of who you are as a business or organization.  Leave the technical or detailed stuff for white papers and Blog posts (a little foreshadowing for you).

Put it down, walk away and do something else.  After you’ve had some time apart from your story, come back to it and read it again.  Does it still sound like you?  No?  Make some edits and repeat the last step.

Yes, it does sound like you?  Good.  Now, share it with a few of your best clients, colleagues, associates, members, etc. and get some of the best feedback on your business you’ve ever read.  The feedback you get will help you to determine how these people think about your organization.  Make a note of this; you will want to refer back to it often.

Tip Two – INSPIRATION

I don’t care what anyone says, writing is hard.  Even if you are writing about something you care deeply about.  It still takes time and dedication.  It also takes a lot of inspiration.

Ideas beget ideas.  Even if you disagree with someone else’s idea, it can still get your creative juices flowing.  The process of creation generally starts with some sort of catalyst.  So, where do you get good content ideas?  From other content.

So, start reading blogs, newsletters, trade journals.  Watch YouTube videos from experts in your industry.  Devour.

Here are some ways to get great content delivered to you everyday…

Google alerts – Let’s say you are a bike shop, well set up an alert on “biking”

Blogs and newsletters – Some of the better blogs out there will have a way to subscribe.  This could be an email newsletter or an RSS feed

Subscribe to YouTube channels – there are some great retreads of seminars, presentations, etc out there.

Competitors – Seriously, what are they talking about? What aren’t they talking about?  Figure out how you can do it better.

Now that you have these channels open and are receiving lots of inspiration, start jotting down ideas.  Keep a notepad on your desk or wherever you do your best thinking and fill it with scribbles only you can understand.

When you find the time to write something, you can go back to your list for ideas.  Make sure you jot down on this list where those ideas came from, in case you need some reference points.

Tip Three – RECYCLING

Not all content you create for online marketing has to be brand spanking new.  Try looking back through all of your past materials for some things you can re-use.

If you are a technical firm you might have a series of white papers you’ve written in the past.  Can these possibly be repurposed for your web site or Blog?  Or could they inspire a Blog post that references and links back to the white paper, also on your web site?

How about lengthy emails you’ve written answering a client’s question?  This is often a great source of inspiration for Blog posts.  Think about it, a client has asked you about something specific.  You fire back a brilliantly written explanation that the client is thankful to receive.  Well, turn this into a Blog post.

If you are writing content for your web site for the first time or you are looking to enhance or refresh your content, you can certainly look to these same places for ideas.  You can also look back through your past marketing materials.  Which of them were wildly successful?  How can you recreate that success online?

You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel.  You might just need to put some air in the tire.

Tip Four – WRITE

If you are going to go to all this trouble, you want to make sure you are actually able to write.  You want to have the tools in place so that you can write and post content yourself.

I know this might sound obvious but so many of our clients come to us talking about content but have no plan for how they will create and manage it from day to day.  With blogs and content management systems today you can create content easily and on YOUR SITE.

That is really the key.  If you are going to write, make sure you are writing for your own site.  Don’t just give all of your good content away by posting it on Facebook or any other site that isn’t yours.

Sure, sharing content and guest blogging are both beneficial but you don’t want to give it all away.  Even with all of this transparency and openness today, ownership is still important.

There are various levels of content management systems for various levels of budgets.  WordPress, for example, is a scalable content management solution that can be templated or completely customized, depending on your budget.

You want to make sure you have all of the tools in place so that you have no excuse not to write when the time is right to write.

Tip Five – PROMOTE

You cannot create content in a vacuum.  This is marketing, you need to share.  If you don’t put your content out there then who is going to read it?  The more you get this content out there the more traffic your site will get.

If you are blogging, do your own “syndication.”  You can easily link your Blog to your Facebook page or tweet your latest Blog posts.  In fact, most social media outlets will have a place where you can add the RSS feed directly from your Blog.  Just make sure it is on your site first so the links you are building come back to your web site.

To promote the other content on your web site, simply promote your site.  Place your web address on everything.  Place it in your email signature, on business cards, in your advertising, your social media profiles, etc.

Email newsletters are also a great way to promote your content.  You can include summaries of your latest blog posts, information about specific product offerings or updates about what is happening in your company.

Promoting your content will make you a better writer.  Promotion and tracking help you see what content works and what content is dead weight.  You will see which Blog posts are getting comments or feedback.  You can tell which pages of your site are popular by checking your web statistics.  You can see what topics in your email newsletters are getting clicked.

The feedback you get will help you to find out more about who you are.  And it will inspire you to create more content and seek more inspiration.  It is a cycle that is perpetuated by the successes and failures it creates.

All of this leads to more qualified traffic, better conversion rates and a more successful inbound marketing strategy.

At Local SEO company in Lakewood, CO, they have experienced content creation and marketing teams who can help your businesses in creating inspiring, quality content that touch the hearts of your consumers.

[mostlymovieswithmax]

Top 3 Songs In The UK At The Moment [my impressions]

I thought I’d do something new on this blog because it’s past midnight and I’ve just listened to the UK top three songs of the moment and I feel like writing a review on each of them that includes my own personal thoughts and opinions. Now I don’t really listen to chart music but I’ll have a listen every so often to see what the general consensus for “good music” is within the public eye. Obviously art is subjective though so I’m not going to bash anyone for liking certain types of art over others because there would be no point. So on the 8th of February 2018, what are the top three songs in the United Kingdom at the moment (according to Spotify)?

3. Dua Lipa - IDGAF

I won’t lie: as modern Pop tracks go, this isn’t the worst. It’s got a catchy hook and for the most part, it held my attention. Dua Lipa as an artist isn’t someone I really have a problem with because she’s pretty harmless and from what I’ve heard of her (literally two songs), she’s probably only going to get bigger if she keeps with the direction that she’s going. IDGAF as a song, to me, is pretty okay. It’s nothing amazing and it doesn’t reinvent the wheel or anything but I doubt it’s trying to. The instrumentation and production of this song is done well at the very least. The lyrics are really generic as they talk about post-breakup empowerment and how she doesn’t need him anymore! Wooo let’s name the song something spicy; something edgy that all the teen girls will relate to and sing really loudly even though none of them have ever been in a serious relationship! But nothing too explicit because we want this to be mentioned on the radio. We’ll call it ‘IDGAF’ so everyone knows we’re down with the kids! Damn, I love internet slang! IDGAF isn’t a bad song at all, it’s just that as a concept, it’s been done to death and there’s nothing that really stands out to me. Sure the chorus is quite catchy and the instrumentation isn’t bad (although it is painfully obvious that the producers have just abused the looping function too much) but honestly that’s just the sort of thing I expect from a Pop song. It’s just that with the state of chart hits nowadays, it’s easy to hear a song that’s actually decent and think that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. This isn’t a brilliant song. It doesn’t push the envelope in any way and it doesn’t take any risks either. I’ll give credit where credit is due but in the grand scheme of music, IDGAF is a song that I can see being forgotten quite quickly.

2. Ramz - Barking

I’ve never heard of Ramz in my life but from what I can tell, he’s quite new to the scene. With his most recent hit ‘Barking’ hitting the top 2 in the UK charts, it seems Ramz has got his big break. But will he be a one hit wonder? I really couldn’t care less. I really found so little to be enjoyed in Barking. The lyrics are uninspired and repetitive; the instrumentation is really boring and very typical of the genre Ramz is trying to imitate what with the cheesy bell sound and a drum loop that if listened to with any sort of focus is really piercing and annoying. The vocals are clearly processed quite heavily and no wonder because Ramz sounds so fucking bored in this track, I fear that if you stripped it back to raw audio, it might sound like he’s just gotten out of bed. I was really caught off guard by the first few seconds of this song where there’s a woman laughing (which I thought at first was a cough) and saying some weird shit. It sounded like the kind of thing you’d put over a track for a couple of seconds on YouTube to stop people from being able to rip it to mp3 but I looked at the lyrics to this song and they are actually the lyrics: “Mokuba lives”. Who the fuck is Mokuba? Do you mean Mufasa, Simba’s deceased father, killed in a betrayal by his evil brother, Scar? Because I’m pretty sure he’s still dead, man. I don’t really understand the lyrics to this song. Mainly the first lyric of the chorus which just really bugs me: ‘I might link my ting from Barking’. First of all, my man Ramz here says the first four lines of the chorus four damn times. With literally no variation in how he sings it each time. Now I’m not massively proficient in the London slang that makes it into Grime music these days but really though who can tell me what that first line means? From what I can pick apart, he’s singing about getting on a train from Barking. But he’s linking his ting from Barking. What is his ting? I’m pretty sure you have to specify what the ‘ting’ is in this instance. What are you linking from Barking? Are you taking a detour on your journey from Barking? Because I don’t know! I’ve been on my fair share of trains but never have I ever phrased a sentence like that in reference to one. I feel like Barking is a song about a girl, but it’s also about how popular Ramz is now; how he’s getting attention from so many people that he doesn’t need this girl anymore. Or maybe I’m wrong; I really have no clue. Where was I going with this? I don’t really know if I’m honest. Barking is a really lacklustre attempt at making something that could potentially get big. There’s nothing fun about it and it borrows so many elements from different artists and genres that it forgets to be its own piece of art. Because that’s what I’m supposed to be talking about here: art. Art is such a broad subject matter and it’s incredibly hard to define but I would say that most people would agree that for something to be considered art, it has to make the viewer (or listener in this case) feel some kind of emotion. But that’s something I didn’t get with Barking.

1. Drake - God’s Plan

I had no idea what the fuck was being said in the first few seconds of this song. In fact I have no idea what’s being said for the majority of this song so I’m just going to pick out a few lines that made me really think: “It’s a lot of bad things” Shit, man it sure is. Can’t really argue with that one. That’s just straight up fact. This line is referencing how Drake feels that people aren’t always on his side. Some who in fact are actually wishing bad things upon him. The majority of that post-chorus is mostly the same lyrics of “they wishin’ bad things on me”. Like okay, Drake. You’re a millionaire; what does it even matter to you? Buy some new friends. “I make sure that North side eat” Here we have Drake demonstrating how much of a good Samaritan he is. He feeds the North side. Now I’m having a hard time wondering why anyone would wish bad things on my guy Drake. He literally said in this song about how he makes sure the North side eats and that just means Drake is a good guy. Stop being mean to him! “God’s plan. God’s plan” Drake just says this out of nowhere. Just completely without context or anything that lends itself to those lyrics. I really just think they’re in there so that he could call the song ‘God’s Plan’. I mean he could have called the song that without those lyrics but whatever. I’ve never had a number 1 single so what the fuck do I know about writing music? So apart from the lyrical content and the vocals that are a drone of noise only slightly above passionless, what’s to be said about the rest of the song? The drum loop is pretty dull and once again, very typical of the genre. Backed up by the low bass sound gives the song much needed depth. The other instruments are of course, well produced and mixed, but don’t really do much to make the song stand out against other songs as there’s no real melody to them which means that the drum track is pulled to the forefront of the mix, overpowering even the vocals at times. God’s Plan isn’t an awful song by any means; I just don’t think it’s anything special and to be at number one in the UK charts, while not shocking, is a little disappointing because there are some good songs in the Spotify charts at the moment such as The Greatest Show from The Greatest Showman, A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman, and Rewrite The Stars from The Greatest Showman… It’s got a good soundtrack. My point being that there are other songs that easily deserve to replace God’s Plan. Damn I even think IDGAF could be a contender. I realise the fact that is it Drake had a big effect on how well this song did, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but when you hold artists to such high esteem it takes pressure off of them to create something that’s actually good and they begin to stagnate and don’t grow as musicians or push themselves because they know that whatever they put out is going to be successful because their image is enough to get them that success (*cough* Ed Sheeran *cough*). If you don’t demand progression from musicians then they don’t develop as artists and the art that they create becomes predictable and bland and that really isn’t where I want to see the music industry heading.

[azeemmohammedglasgow]

Azeem Mohammed glasgow Lead Generation In The Cards? These Hints Are For You!

Azeem Mohammed glasgow Top service provider.  You own a business so you understand the importance of getting new leads; without them it can greatly harm any success you might have. Employing lead generation methods is the way to go. Read on if you want to learn more about the topic of lead generation.

Make sure your landing page is ready for visitors before you generate a lot of promising leads. Your landing page needs to contain all relevant information and options to buy or download. If your landing page is constructed well, you will have a much greater chance of converting your leads into sales.

The buying cycle is something you will want to become familiar with. Customers generally think about offers, do some more research and then make a decision. If you're able to target the content and offers to that cycle, you may help them consider buying from you!

Use consumer reviews and case studies when you're trying to build your leads. If you can offer data to support your claims, consumers will be more confident about sharing their information or buying. Use studies that are relevant to your business and have customers review your products.

Check out events in your area and see if there's a way you can use them to generate leads. For example, if there is a cycling race, buy a sponsorship package. Then you can get yourself on TV talking about it, or in the paper, or just talk to people who are there to watch.

 Mohammed glasgow Most excellent service provider. Do not pre-judge your lead gathering technique. Though you may think you are not going to get great results, or you are overly confident about the success, you cannot be sure. The only way to know if your lead generation is working is to put it into action without preconceived ideas about results.

Talk to business owners in related industries. They may be willing to share leads with you, by sending their customers your way. For example, if you own a shop where you sell balloons, talking to a florist about a joint venture is a great way to get leads from another business.

If you have not been tapping into the power of social media enough, then it's time to expand your efforts. There are cost efficient social media campaigns you can run on the most popular sites, and ways to really make content go viral. All of your customer base is there to help you share what you can do for your new customers.

Azeem Mohammed glasgow Professional tips provider.  Don't be afraid to cut certain tactics that aren't performing as they should. Even if a tactic is generating a ton of leads, it may be that the leads just really aren't that strong. If there's low to no conversion, why continue spending in the channel? Rather double down on tactics that are converting.

Look at your competitors to see what tactics they use to generate leads. You don't need to reinvent the wheel when you are going to market. Oftentimes, your competitors have already done the hard work for you. If you see them using certain tactics heavily, there's a good chance they are doing so because it works.

When using Twitter, most people think about growing followers and using hash tags. Sure, but also consider searching for keywords related to your products so that you can find people talking about buying things related to your products. Finding posts of interest can help you generate new leads within your niche.

Consider giving a yearly gift to those who bring you the most referrals. It doesn't have to be something big, even a bottle of nice wine will do, but it shows them you care. Be sure to deliver it by hand and personally so you can tell them how much you appreciate their help.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to generate leads is through referrals for your services! Offering existing customers incentives for referrals, such as a certain amount of money discounted the next time they use your services, will let you have several leads quickly. It's a foolproof way to get new business!

Remember that trending on social media isn't the be-all and end-all of marketing. If you can get any positive buzz at all about what you're selling, you're generating leads. When using social media, the content is king as long as you present it in a way which doesn't sound like spam.

Azeem Mohammed glasgow Most excellent service provider.  Use cost-effective advertising. Target those who are already interested in your niche with your ads, and offer them something of value. People like to receive free or discounted stuff, so getting them to your website this way will not be tough to do. Just make sure that more great offers await them on your site.

If you plan to use pay-per-click ads to promote your website or social media, create ads which actually bring in targeted leads. Make sure it is clear what you're selling and that the call to action is solid. Don't make them blink or include fluorescent colors unless you want to drive away potential leads.

Create high quality leads by keeping communication personable with zero overselling. If a prospect thinks you are selling them too much, they'll have an easier time saying no to you. People today aren't looking for someone to sell them stuff. In fact, it is your task to show how your service or product can solve a problem. It should solve a problem that they have been experiencing.

Make sure your offers are appropriate. They must be relevant to the prospective buyer. Great content is important, but the timing of its delivery is also important. Many customers will see information at different parts of their decision process. Try picking a particular time you think is best to better your chances of getting on their short list.

Now that you have reviewed this information, you likely understand how easy lead generation can actually be. Use the tips found in this article, and your business will begin booming in no time. Get started today generating those leads, so your business can be very successful!

[gethealthy18-blog]

316: 17 Practical Time-Saving Systems for Parents (& How I “Get It All Done”)

New Post has been published on http://healingawerness.com/news/316-17-practical-time-saving-systems-for-parents-how-i-get-it-all-done/

316: 17 Practical Time-Saving Systems for Parents (& How I “Get It All Done”)

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This episode is sponsored by Four Sigmatic… the reason I’m on shrooms (the legal kind) every day. They make a wide variety of superfood mushroom infused products from coffees and teas to elixirs and even chocolate that is infused with ten mushrooms! I have a shelf in my pantry just for four sigmatic products and keep pretty much off of them on hand. Some current favorites… my kids love the reishi infused cocoa, and I love that it helps them sleep! I also really enjoy their 10-mushroom blend which contains all of my favorites like chaga, cordyceps, reishi and even meshima. I add this to coffee, tea, or smoothies to get a daily dose of shrooms. As a listener of this podcast, you can save 15% by going to foursigmatic.com/wellnessmama and using the code “wellnessmama”

This podcast is brought to you by Gaia herbs and their black elderberry syrup! I’ve been a big fan of Elderberry syrup for years and theirs is the best premade one I’ve found unless you want to make your own. You can experience for yourself why it is America’s Favorite Organic Black Elderberry Syrup! It is the #1 best-selling organic Black Elderberry syrup in the U.S. This time of year, it is a medicine cabinet staple and immune season essential. Elderberry will help your family stay feeling well with the delicious immune elixir loved by adults and children alike. It is Certified organic – this powerful syrup concentrates the juice from 14.5 grams of elderberries in a single teaspoon, so it’s highly potent. It is made with just four clean whole-food ingredients and is vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free and soy-free, making it safe for most people. Black Elderberry Syrup is safe for the whole family and is formulated for adults and children age 1 and older. You can save big on Gaia Herbs by going to gaiaherbs.com/wellnessmama and use code WELLNESSMAMA at checkout for 20% off your first purchase

Hello, and welcome to “The Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is just me. And I’m answering one of the questions I get asked most often online, which is, “How do I get it all done and balance work and family and self-care and all of the demands that we face in modern life?” So, today, I’m gonna walk you through my systems and how I do it. But there’s a few things I wanna make sure I mention and that you guys understand before we jump in.

First, and most importantly, I don’t do it all, not every day and not even close. So, I’ve written about so many things on the blog. There’s 1,300 blog posts, and there is no way that I get all of that done every single day. That’s a combined 10 years of knowledge and experiments, and I don’t even do all of those things all the time.

So, full disclosure, some days my house is a complete disaster. There have been days where we eat Magic Spoon cereal for dinner. And I’ve tried about a lot of experiments over the years. I’ve written about a lot of them, but I definitely don’t maintain all of them every single day. I found the 80/20 rule that works for me, and I maintain based on that. I’m gonna talk more about that later in the episode. But I just wanted to start by saying I don’t do it all, and I don’t ever wanna be some standard that someone sees on social media and then feels bad because of comparing to.

Number two, in modern life, we as moms especially but parents in general, we face a lot more demands than parents have in the past, and it does take more effort to manage everything. And it’s important to remember, we are not failing because it seems harder than it did for our parents. It actually is harder. I think there are some things we can do to make it less so, but it actually is harder than it used to be for our parents.

So, I think we can use a lot of advantages of technology and use systems to make things easier if we’re intentional about that, and I’m gonna share a lot of my tips for that today. But acknowledging and understanding that there’s just more to manage in modern life than previous generations had had to deal with.

Number three, before we jump in, you should understand that I am absolutely a nerd, and I use math to solve problems in most of my life, including a lot of the stuff I’m gonna talk about in this podcast. I apologize in advance if you aren’t a math person, but the ideas still work even if you don’t care about the math side. So bear with me through that part.

And lastly, these systems are what work for me and my family, and I’m sharing practical examples and trying to go into as much detail as possible in hopes that this will be helpful to you as well. It’s a no way meant to be like a black and white standard for any other family, and it is certainly not meant to be a judgment of anyone else’s systems or how they manage their life. You may end up with something completely drastically different than what I’ve created, and that’s not just okay. That’s awesome.

I think that one of the things that we as parents need the most right now that our children need to see is an example of how people can have different views or ways of doing things and still get along and treat each other with respect and kindness. So imagine how much all of our stress levels would change if we all did that in our interactions in person and especially online. So, none of this is meant to be a judgment of anyone who does anything differently. I’m just sharing my systems and hopes that they will be parts of this that can be helpful to you.

I think there are some commonalities that can be helpful in staying on top of the demands of modern life and all the things we do face. And so I’m gonna base these next 17 tips on that and hopes that they will be helpful to you as well.

So, with that said, tip number one, start with the 80/20 principle or the idea of kind of a minimum effective dose, and this is the Pareto principle if you’ve heard of that. It’s also known as the 80/20 rule, or I think it’s also called the law of the vital few or in math, the principle of factor sparsity.

And boiled down, it basically means that in a lot of different areas, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, or 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs or the activities. And this is used in sports, and there are examples of it in economics. It’s used in computing. But I found it extremely helpful in managing modern life as well, especially in motherhood. Of all the people in the world who I feel like need to be more efficient, moms are for sure at the top of the list. I’ve always said that moms are the busiest and most effective people on the planet and that if you can give moms more bandwidth and reduce overwhelm, moms can absolutely change the world. So I figured if top performers in business are using this and economists and mathematicians and even sports teams that they were things that were valuable that moms could use as well.

You know, there’s that joke that evolution must not work because moms still only have two hands, and I think we actually really need clones or at least two brains to manage it all. But I feel like keeping this rule in mind helps me to focus on the things that are most important in all of those areas that I’m responsible for managing and still feel like I’m getting most of it done without dropping plates or feeling like I’m letting things fall through the cracks. So I find myself constantly applying this rule to various aspects of life, and it’s made me much more efficient. Even just starting to think in the terms of 80/20 and like what are the 20% of things that I need to do and focus on the most, that has taken the stress off of the other 80%. This will be woven in throughout the podcast, and I’ll give practical examples of how you can use that in various aspects of your life.

So, tip number two would be to simplify food in your home. And just as I mentioned in the last tip, we tend to eat the same 20% of meals about 80% of the time. And so realizing this, I was able to start planning for that, and I realized I could automate a lot of our eating by understanding that. So, this reduces the need to meal plan as much. It also simplifies shopping because I know ahead of time, I can streamline food preparation, and it really kind of just takes the mental guesswork out of planning food in general. And this also helps things like keeping the pantry stocked, and it also means that when I travel or things get really busy, someone else can fill in parts of that system as well.

So on a practical level, here are some of the ways that I implement this. I keep a list, and I stock my most common pantry staples as we…80% of our pantry staples come from things like Primal Kitchen, Paleovalley beef sticks, tuna and sardines from Thrive Market, other condiments, bulk items, nuts, rice, quinoa, etc. I can actually put a list of those in the show notes so that you can see kind of my constant reorder list. But rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time, I know roughly what those things are and how often and how quickly we go through them. So I can actually either set up auto-orders for some of those things or at least just have a list in my phone. I use the Notes app constantly so that when it’s time to order, I know where everything is in one place.

I also create an 80/20 meal plan, and I can share more detail about this in a future podcast as well. But the short version is that for each of the seasons, I focus on the things that are in season and least expensive. So basically, the vegetables that are in season in spring, summer, fall, and winter, and I plan around those because, in general, then I know those are less expensive when they’re in season and also more nutrient-dense. And I focus only on meals that I know the whole family likes that are easy to prepare, that are inexpensive, and that are nutrient-dense. And with those criteria, I find our top 14 meals for each season, and I only had to do this once because, once it’s done, it’s repeatable.

So then once I have the 14 meals for each season, I separate those into two weekly menus and create shopping lists for each one. I use the Real Plans app, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes because it’s extremely helpful. And you can input your own recipes into it, and it will auto-generate a shopping list that you can then if you already have ingredients check them off. You can adapt it for your family size or for all kinds of things. And then I print out the two-week meal plans together and the shopping list, and I put them in little sleeves and kind of put them in a notebook, so they are in the kitchen. So in other words, if that was confusing for a second, I make two one week meal plans for each season.

So for winter, it might focus on veggies like cabbage and greens and sweet potatoes and root veggies and cruciferous vegetables, and for each season, there’s different vegetables. And then we alternate those weeks. We go back and forth between those two one week meal plans. So we’re not eating anything more than once every 14 days. So there’s plenty of variety built in, and also because it’s pre-planned, anyone can handle the shopping and anyone can handle the cooking. So if things are busy, my husband could handle the shopping if he needed to, or I could just order the groceries online. I know what I need with everything in one place. And because the recipes are already printed, the kids are able to jump in and prepare meals sometimes, or I already have it there, or if grandparents are staying while we’re traveling, it’s just easy for someone else to jump in and handle the system.

I also spend 20% of time making 80% of the food with bulk cooking. And I don’t do this every single week, but especially on busy weeks, I do try to prioritize this. So often I will double recipes to have leftovers for breakfast or lunches or just block out some time on the weekend and pre-prep as much as possible for the week. And my kids usually make breakfast and lunches on their own, and I really just focus on family dinners. But if when I can, I’ll double recipes, and that way they have that for breakfast or lunch without them having to make something else. And I know that there’s always nutrient-dense options available. So that’s kind of the food system. Again, I’ll do a whole podcast on this in the future that breaks down and then share all the specifics of what that actually looks like because it’s been a huge time and money saver. But it’s really as simple as starting with that kind of system, and then you only have to create those four meal plans with the alternating two weeks, and you’ve got a repeatable meal plan for the year.

Tip number three would be to establish systems for clothing in the house. This is another area where you really can apply the 80/20 principle. If you think about it, a lot of us wear the same 20% of our clothing about 80% of the time. I don’t know about you, but this is especially true with my kids. The younger ones especially have like these kinds of four or five favorite outfits that they just wear over and over and over, and everything else in their drawer was just pretty much ignored. So, knowing that, I realized that paring down reduces mental and physical clutter, and it was an area that I could easily simplify.

So if we do this for everybody in the house, there’s less in the house that we have to manage. There’s less laundry, and less things end up on the floor. I have blog posts about capsule wardrobes for kids, and I’ve been implementing this with myself as well. But you can find those blog posts online. Just google Wellness Mama capsule wardrobes or check out the show notes for really like specific examples of what that looks like for my kids.

But it’s really as simple as having smaller amounts of clothing that are all relatively easy to combine and that go with each other and that all fit in a drawer easily and that the kids are capable of pairing. But for me, this is something I’ve been…especially as I’ve like changed sizes so much, and I had to get rid of most of my clothes, anyway I try to simplify as I had to buy new clothes. So I just have two pairs of jeans that I absolutely love, and that beats having a lot more pairs of jeans that mostly kind of fit or they aren’t quite as comfortable and I usually don’t wear anyway. And so I’ve just tried to simplify that for myself as well.

I think this is different for each family, and certainly, depending on climate, you may need a lot more clothing or different kinds of clothing or if you travel a lot or your climate changes a lot. But in general, I kind of try to stick to that same type of system of having…by season, those simple clothing that all kind of goes together and just minimizing because I…I mean, we all have so many more clothes typically than we actually need.

Tip number four. I wanted to make this one early on in the podcast because I think it’s one that moms tend to ignore a lot, which is to work in self-care regularly. And this is another area that is completely different for every single person. But most parents, and especially moms, statistically, we don’t get enough sleep, and we don’t have enough time for self-care. And I actually kind of hate that word because I think it’s become kind of…it’s just ambiguous and applies to a lot of different things that maybe brings up ideas of taking bubble baths, which I just personally don’t ever have time to do.

But I think for moms, a lot of times, this seems like an impossible item on the to-do list because everybody else gets priority before us, and we’ve got so much to manage. Hopefully, all the systems in this podcast help create time to make this easier. But I also know that during the younger years of our kids’ life, it can be really tough to find time for self-care at all.

But like other areas, if we can identify the 20% of things that are most important for us in self-care, so those 20% of things that reduce stress the most or that seem to replenish us the most, then we could focus on those things when we actually do have the time. So for me personally, just as examples, this is things like getting in the sauna almost daily whenever I can, moving around even for a short period of time. I’m not saying exercise. I don’t think I’ll ever be the type to exercise for an hour a day. This is things just like walking or like running outside for a minute or handstands, that kind of thing. Just working in movement regularly makes a big difference for my mindset.

Also, spending quality time with my husband and close friends makes a big difference in my mindset. And, of course, community and so many other beneficial things are built into that as well. So it’s self-care, but it’s also beneficial in other aspects of life. Taking certain supplements has been really helpful for me just in making sure that I had the physical and mental resiliency that I needed to manage everything.

And I’ve mentioned this before several times in the podcast about morning sunlight. So, this was the advice of my doctor years and years ago when I first got diagnosed with Hashimoto’s to spend some time outside as soon as possible after waking up. This is really important for circadian rhythm. I see a difference in my sleep and then my stress levels, and it’s time outside usually with my husband or kids. So it’s also community time as well. So those are my things that I tend to prioritize and that I notice effects in other areas from. They are gonna be different for each person, but if you can identify the things that kind of replenish you and fill you up the most, and you can even just work in tiny bits of them during the day, you may see a big difference in your mindset.

So tip number five, realistic minimalism in our households. So, just like I mentioned in food and in clothing and even in self-care, we tend to use the same 20% of stuff in our house most of the time too. And, for instance, kids will use the same 20-ish percent of toys most of the time. Over time, I’ve used a whole lot of systems to minimize and reduce stuff, and I think there’s a lot of different approaches that work. There’s Marie Kondo systems. There’s all kinds of organizing systems.

For the kids’ toys, when I implemented this, I actually just put most of their toys in the attic, and then I didn’t get them back out unless they asked for a specific one. I try to pare down two types of toys that could all go together and be easily stored like Legos and avoid buying single-purpose toys. And when we first started making that switch, I literally just put most of the toys in the attic one day. And if they were like, “Hey, mom, have you seen whatever?” I would go find that specific toy, but most of the things they never even missed. And keeping the things in the attic for a few months gave me that time to find those things if there was something that was really important to them without just getting rid of something and them missing it. We were able to get rid of so much that way.

But some specific tips, because I think if you minimize too quickly or drastically, you can kind of upset the applecart in a home. So I think it’s important to lead by example in this. So don’t start by just throwing away all of the kids’ stuff or getting rid of it instantly. That’s why I used the attic thing. But also I think it’s important to set the example and us do it first. So, before we start throwing away all the things they love, we need to do that for ourselves and show the example and also reduce our own mental clutter by doing that. So, for me, I started with our own closets and with my bedroom, and that felt manageable. And I didn’t have to involve the kids, but I would talk to them about the process and let them see the difference it made before I started tackling their stuff. And then I let them be involved when we actually started getting rid of their stuff.

Also, we found it helpful to have like a little donation station in our house. So this is basically just a large box, a tote in a closet, that is a place where the kids know and we know that they can put stuff. So this is where people can put anything they no longer want or need, and it’s also a judgment-free zone. I think I tried not to do this, but it’s like when something was a gift to a child or something that we would want them to have, it’s hard not to be like, “Oh, you’re getting rid of that.” But the donation station is a judgment-free zone. Anyone can put anything in there to donate even if it was a gift without judgment.

So also grouping by categories was really helpful for me. This is one thing that I do think the “life-changing magic of tidying up” I got absolutely right because you can’t really see how much of something you own if you don’t see it all in one place. And so my advice is to gather all of the same things, so, for instance, all of my clothing or all of the kids’ toys, whatever it would be. I don’t do the whole thing where I see if it sparks joy, but seeing everything in one place helps me think of like 80/20. So I keep 20% of these things and get rid of most of the others.

Like as a practical example of this. The categories I kind of used when we did this whole master minimizing thing. Clothing and closets were each their own category. Our bedroom was a category. Each of the kids’ bedrooms was its own category. The kitchen obviously its own category. Like outdoor stuff in the garage was its own category. And then like linens kind of were their own category and paperwork, which was the bane of my existence, was its own category as well.

For me, things like the schoolroom and personal items like sentimental items are not on this list because I can’t pare down school stuff to 20% when we actually only buy the stuff that we actually need for that. So now we just use clothes storage to keep the school stuff and try to minimize everything else. Also, for kids, I found it really helpful with trying to keep things minimized is to define physical boundaries because they are often very concrete and visual, especially at young ages. And so this helps them understand limits on their belongings in a positive way that isn’t stressful. I actually first learned this tip from a friend who they sold their house and moved into a camper and traveled, and they had five kids. And so each kid got a very specific size box where they had to keep all of their toys, and they could bring whatever they wanted as long as it fit in that box. And so just having that kind of idea, I applied that to our house even though we don’t, you know, live in an RV.

We were able to kind of apply that, “You can pick all the toys that you want and whatever you wanna keep. It just needs to fit within these boundaries.” So, for instance, it could be that all toys need to fit in a toy box or that if they have a collection of something, it all needs to fit in a specific shelf or display or if it’s stuffed animals, my youngest loves stuffed animals, she can have them all, but they have to fit within her little bed so that they’re not everywhere all the time. This is also important and has been really helpful with kids sharing rooms. That way they each have their own specific area where they can have their personal possessions. You can also then enforce like, “This is private space. You need to ask your sibling before you touch anything that’s in this area.” It might be the side of the bed or on the dresser or underneath the bed or whatever it may be, but that way they have their own space that they feel like is theirs. And this also makes it much more manageable.

Tip number six. Use the same idea to create time management systems. And in my mind, time is actually the most important area to 80/20 because, just like in the other areas, I feel like 80% of our stress can sometimes come from 20% of the inputs. And I think like this is where we should absolutely start with time management. So identify the activities that are causing the most stress for you and then figure out how to simplify, automate, or get rid of the stress from them at least.

You may not be able to get rid of the activity, but you can get rid of the stress from it. And I’m gonna talk more about that later on when I get to the mindset tips, but this is actually I think one of the more important things. And if you’re gonna start with something, I would start with time management system. Conversely, I think it’s important to identify the 20% of what we need to do in our time that brings the most happiness, so kind of like a little bit touching on that self-care idea.

To do this, look at your calendar and write out all of the activities that you have to do in a given week or month, whatever time period you wanna tackle, especially if things are repeating week after week. Like in my life, just write them out once. So identify those. And then it’s important to find the areas where you can improve in both directions. So, basically, like write this out and prioritize the things that are causing the most stress and the things that are causing the most good and then 80/20, all of those areas, and prioritize.

So for me, this was things like for time management, meal planning and food saved a lot of time, batching and everything. So whether it’s checking email or cleaning, etc., those are all in very specific times. I figured out the things that I absolutely had to do, the 20% that I couldn’t let go of, and then I scheduled those things. So they were not negotiable. They had a time that they were gonna get done, but then I didn’t have to worry about them when they weren’t getting done. And then also create systems and get others involved when it doesn’t need to be something that entirely falls on you.

And I wish I could give a lot more specifics to this, but I think my day to day life is probably not at all typical. And so my system may not be really specifically helpful just to hand off to you, but if you can work through your own calendar and find what are the activities and the systems, things you need, starting there and giving everything a time and a place and a defined area will really help with the mental stress. Also, in time management, so a tip on this. I take this 80/20 rule to mean that we should focus on the 20% that’s most important before doing anything else in the 80%. So, I use this to tackle the most important and effective things each day. And I said I use my Notes app on my phone quite a bit, but in there, I’ll put the top three activities I need to do in any given day, or it might be a couple more than that to get the top 20% done. And when I have time to work through things, those are what I prioritize first. So before I start doing the things that aren’t important, I will tackle those things.

Tip number seven, and caveat, before I even say this, I know this is not always possible in certain stages of pregnancy and newborn life. But tip number seven, ruthlessly prioritize sleep because this is an area you can’t actually 80/20. It’s just directly based on time. You will not get 80% of your results from sleeping 20% of the time. That does not work. However, I think you can use the idea of this to improve sleep quality, especially if you’re tracking your sleep. It took me years of experimentation to figure this out for me. I think there are some universal human commonalities when it comes to sleep. So I’ll share those, but I also think there’s value in tracking your own sleep.

Personally, I do this with an Oura ring, and you can check out the show notes, I have a discount code you can find there if you wanna get one. Basically, it’s a ring that you wear, and it does have airplane mode, so if you’re worried about the EMF. I always wear it in airplane mode. It doesn’t have any EMF while I’m wearing it. And then when I put on the charger to charge, it goes into Bluetooth mode, it syncs to my phone and then goes back into airplane mode. The Oura ring tracks things like your sleep quality, which has been really amazing to see because I started to notice the things that improve sleep and the things that really messed it up.

It also can track your activity. It tracks your heart rate variability, which is something I’ve talked about on here before. I think it’s a really important metric as it kind of indicates your overall just adaptability and long-term potential like for longevity and all kinds of things. And it tracks a lot of other things as well, body temperature to heart rate, resting heart rate, etc. So that’s been really helpful to me to actually dial all of these things down. This will vary somewhat by person like I said, but I think the 20% of things that make the biggest difference for me and it probably have universal application to some degree are things like being in bed by 10:00 p.m.

And full disclosure, I am not good at this. It does not happen every single night. In fact, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as I would like to. But when I am in bed and asleep by 10:00 p.m., I see noticeable and immediate drastic changes in sleep and heart rate variability. And I know that’s not always possible with kids but whenever it is… And I know as a mom too, it’s that constant battle of, you know, “The kids are in bed. I’m tired and I wanna sleep, but I also just I’m enjoying this quiet time.” And I often fall into that. I’d rather stay up and enjoy the quiet too. But there are measurable differences in my sleep when I prioritize the sleep at night.

Also, two things that have helped with my sleep quality that I drink almost every night unless I’m fasting are the Reishi Elixir from Four Sigmatic, which I’ll probably link in the show notes to that, and Gold drink from Organifi. They’re both actually reishi based and have other herbs that help improve sleep quality. And I will see about like 10% to 15% improvement in most of my sleep metrics when I use those. Just like I mentioned before, I don’t use them every single day because I don’t use anything every single day. But I do most nights drink one or the other of those, and I also take magnesium to help with sleep and see change from that. But I’m one of the weird small percent of the population, I can’t actually take magnesium at night. So I take magnesium during the day and then notice a difference in my sleep at night.

Another thing that is drastic and I notice it every time I’m away from home, I use a Chilipad or an Ooler on my bed, and again, discount codes for those in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. But these are basically devices that have…the part that’s on your bed is not EMFs at all, and I have tested this. But it’s basically a thin pad that goes underneath your sheet but on top of your mattress and that a machine runs cooled water through, or it can actually be any temperature water between 55 degrees and 110 degrees. There’s a lot of data showing that the optimal sleep temperature is somewhere in between 60 and 70 degrees, and it takes a lot of energy to heat or cool our house to get within that range, and so just cooling our bed is much more energy-efficient.

The device itself is far enough away from the bed that it does not have measurable EMF readings when I’m in the bed. And I noticed just…I mean, noticeable without even tracking huge difference in my sleep when I use one of those devices. The Chilipad is the original. It’s less expensive. The Ooler is more expensive but slightly more effective. But again, check out the show notes at wellnessmama.fm for discount on both of those. I wish so much that I had known about those when I was pregnant because that whole pregnancy sweat and like postpartum sweat, I think it would have made a drastic difference. But I noticed a huge difference in sleep from those, and I’ve given those as Christmas presents to many people because I love them so much.

Another thing that makes a noticeable difference, especially over time, this is more cumulative but is sauna use during the day. And I know I’ve talked about sauna use in a couple recent podcasts, so I won’t go deep on all the benefits of that other than to say that the statistics are pretty incredible for a reduction of all-cause mortality, reduction of cardiovascular events, for weight loss, for all kinds of things. And when I sauna during the day, not too close to bedtime, I see sleep improvements, especially over time. Also movement during the day.

I’m not saying exercise. I know that it’s hard often as moms to fit an exercise. Like what’s gonna work for each person is such different here. But when I move in certain ways, I do notice improvements in my sleep. And so the things I typically tend to prioritize are things like just walking, not like intense walking. Just walking for fun makes a big difference. I’ve been doing high-intensity training only a couple times a week. I use the CAR.O.L. bike, but this can be done with sprinting or any kind of like cardio-based device. And that’s really just like a 10-minute thing. So it’s not a long program at all.

And then I just started integrating lifting weights a couple times a week, and that will temporarily reduce my HRV right after it because of the muscle pull or the muscle burn, but then over time, it gets much better. So, those are all kinds of the movements that have worked for me. Again, I think this is very individualized, and so those are the ones that work for me.

And then lastly, one tip for falling asleep more quickly and that I see about like for me usually about an 8-point improvement in my HRV when I do is using 4-7-8 breathing as I fall asleep. This is something I have written about, and I have a post about four sleep tips that actually work and also Dr. Andrew Weil mentioned on this podcast. But the idea is basically that you breathe in for a count of four and hold for a count of seven and then slowly breathe out for a count of eight. And the idea is you are using your breath to remove excess carbon dioxide from the body to calm and get into parasympathetic versus sympathetic nervous system. And it just overall helps.

I also find that when I prioritize sleep logically, I notice the effects in other aspects of life as reduced stress or being more efficient. So this is an area I try as much as possible not to compromise on and to prioritize. And I know that we probably all have that experience of when you don’t get enough sleep how everything seems so much worse and how when you have a great night sleep, you feel almost unstoppable. So, I get it. It’s easier said than done, especially as parents, but when we prioritize sleep, we get much more effective in other aspects of life.

Tip number eight, use the concept of minimum effective dose to fight perfectionism. So, I touched on this a little teeny bit in the 80/20 in the first tip. But to go back to this idea, minimum effective dose basically means identifying the minimum input needed to create the result you want. Often as parents, I think we do a lot more than is needed to get a result because we want our house to look perfect or we feel the pressure to entertain the kids all the time or cook fancy meals or whatever it may be. But minimum effective dose is the idea of doing the smallest amount possible to accomplish what you will need to do.

So as an example, water boils at 212 degrees. Tim Ferriss use this example in his books as he talks about this. Boiling at a higher temperature or longer does not make the water more boiled. It boils at 212, and it boils at any temperature above that. And I use this idea in areas like nutrition and fitness and house management and organization because it helps me battle perfectionism. I think I have a natural tendency towards perfectionism, and it’s not possible as a mom to maintain perfectionism in every area of life. So I try to, when I start falling in that mindset, go back to the idea of minimum effective dose and manage from there.

So, for instance, more working out is not necessarily better. I find that my body does better with less working out but very specific kinds. So I don’t do any type of long cardio whatsoever. I focus on high-intensity interval training or otherwise known as HIIT. And you can look for HIIT studies to see all of the studies about this, but basically, from a VO2 perspective and a cardiovascular perspective, that’s actually more effective than long-term cardio, and it doesn’t have the potential downsides. So there’s a lot of evidence that long-term cardio, especially running, can be really harmful for joints and also just for oxidative damage in the body.

So I do high-intensity interval training instead, minimum effective dose, more is not necessarily better, same thing with resistance and weights. I don’t need to lift weights for an hour a day. Just doing specific ones for a certain amount of time makes a big difference. And then I work in fun stuff, not for exercise, but just for fun. That’s like walking or swimming or paddleboarding and then the occasional intense stuff like pole vaulting just for fun.

I think there’s also an important minimum effective dose when it comes to stress relief or meditation or whatever you do in this area. For me, this means if I can focus on my breath for just 10 minutes a day, that’s my minimum effective dose. More meditating doesn’t actually make me more calm or happy. I’ve learned that from experimentation so that I don’t need to spend an hour a day meditating. I can accomplish that in 10 minutes a day.

So I’ll often use, for instance, tapping apps like The Tapping Solution or specific breathing exercises, or some days, I will use the cold. So I’ll sit in the cold tub for up to 10 minutes usually on 2, 5-minute increments, and that refocuses my mind, and I find my calm. So, this is again gonna be different for every single person, but if you start to analyze and pay attention in your life to what is the smallest amount that I can do to get the same result and stop doing extra stuff, that helps battle that perfectionism.

So, tip number nine, solve for the variable of reduced stress. I told you there’ll be math involved. I apologize in advance if math is not your thing. But what I realized years ago and what I would postulate to you is that it isn’t actually everything we have to get done that causes the stress. It’s knowing all of the stuff that we need to get done and having all of those mental loops open all the time. This is different for each of us, but I’ll share some examples of mine.

In figuring out systems for how to get stuff done, I think this is the variable that you start with because it isn’t always that we actually need to do less. In fact, a lot of times, we need to be able to get more done, although sometimes there may be a need to do less, and that’s something to analyze in each person’s life. But we need to solve…identify for and solve for the variables that are stressing us out the most. So in your life, what does this look like? What are the X and Ys of your stress equation?

Examples. I was trying to manage my whole family of eight in my head and then carrying the emotional and mental responsibility of everything that came with that family and all of those things rather than using the strategies that I had already used in business. So, using a lot of the things I’ve already talked about in this podcast and a few more that I’m still gonna cover, I started focusing on, “How can I reduce stress in this area and whatever it was, whether it was meal planning, whether it was work, whether it was kids?” And I solved for that variable. Now I’m able to actually do the same amount of stuff and actually probably get more done without the stress.

And, of course, 80/20 kind of plays into this as well being more efficient, more effective, the minimum effective dose, doing just what’s required and not overachieving in every single area. But to start to solve for this if this is a new concept for you, I would suggest making a list of all of the things that stress you out the most and then detail specifically under each one what makes things more stressful. And you may find like I did that it isn’t, for instance, cooking that causes the stress, is the constant need to figure out what to cook. It’s that 4 p.m. like, “Oh, my gosh, everything’s frozen. What am I gonna cook for dinner? I need to defrost something or finding the ingredients or cooking something and then family members not like it or complaining about it.” Those are all variables we can solve for.

I actually realized I liked the cooking a lot, and if I could solve for those other variables by planning ahead, knowing what was gonna be cooked, batch cooking and then cooking only meals that were nutrient-dense and that we all liked, I could pretty much solve for all of those variables. I’ll put some more specifics of that in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. Another example, it may not be the actual laundry that causes the stress but the constant clutter related to the laundry or remembering to do it or forgetting the clothes in the washer and then smelling like mildew, or not having certain clothing when it’s needed and it’s sports time and a kid doesn’t have a jersey. We can solve for those variables as well.

Like I mentioned, you as a mom don’t necessarily need to do all the laundry, especially when your kids reach a certain age. For my kids, that’s about four to five. They’re able to handle their own laundry. Then it’s the conscious effort of stopping carrying the emotional responsibility. In fact letting them carry it because truly if they make it…if they show up at soccer practice in a dirty jersey that smells like sweat because they didn’t clean it, maybe they will learn that lesson. Whatever it may be, it’s finding what’s causing you the friction point, what’s causing you the stress and then solving for that.

So it might not be our kids causing stress but the constant questions from them not knowing the schedule or for them being bored. And we can solve for those two. We can create a family culture that avoids boredom. We can have a schedule that they know so they know when things are gonna happen and be prepared. There’s ways to actually take into account a lot of these variables. So make this list for yourself.

And then also I found it helpful to write out what a perfect scenario looks like in each of those areas when I wouldn’t be stressed. So, when the food was handled, what does that look like? When the laundry was handled, what did that look like? When the kids were all happy and not bored and integrated, what did that look like? And in some cases, solving for these variables could mean reducing. So for instance, if here kids are doing a ton of activities each week, and your stress is caused by the constant go-go-go-go and being a chauffeur and running them around, then maybe part of the answer is to reduce activities or to just focus on the 20% that they enjoy the most. If it comes from clutter around the house, it may be important to de-clutter, but often a lot of the stress can be solved with just systems. And so again, it’ll be different for each of us. I hope that my examples were somewhat helpful.

But also from a scheduling perspective, if you can define a time and a place for each activity and item, then you can take away its mental stress. So, for me, this meant when laundry was gonna happen at a certain time each day or each week, then I didn’t have to worry about it when it wasn’t going to happen. When I knew the meal plan for the next three months, I don’t have to spend any energy thinking about that. So find those things that are causing you the most stress and then solve for those first. The variables are different for each people…for each person, but the systems can be kind of universally applicable, and once you find yours, it gets a lot easier.

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Tip number 10, get the family involved. So if you have kids, chances are they are probably part of the reason you have so much on your plate. With the goal of raising functioning adult humans and not perpetual children, it is I feel not just important but like actually vital to get the kids involved in the day-to-day operations of the house and the family, so they can learn life skills. And when we send them off into the world, they have those life skills. This has the benefit if we do it the right way of reducing stress for us as parents. And I touched on this in a couple of the other points about how natural consequences and kids being able to handle a lot of stuff.

But a few specifics just related to this, getting the family involved in creating this team mentality and culture. First rule…I’ve mentioned this a little bit before, but I’m gonna go deeper here. Stop doing what they can do for themselves. And, yes, there will always be exceptions to this, and, yes, I know that there may be times when I wanna spend time with my kids, I do something that they can do. But in general, universally, I have a rule that I won’t do something for my kids that they can do themselves. I know that as parents, we can do it right, or we can do it better, and it’s easier especially when they’re young. But this is part of the reason we are so stressed is because we do. We do it because we can do it right or better.

I know as a new mom, I used to think about this. I did a lot more for my children because it was easier. It was objectively easier for me to load the dishwasher than teach them how to load the dishwasher. With my first child and even with the second arrived, I still actually could do everything for everyone, so I did. And in some ways, it was easier just to do it all. It was easier to get them dressed than let them take forever and end up in a mismatched outfit.

But as I had more kids and as more was added to my plate, I realized this wasn’t a sustainable model. And I say this quite a bit and people are like, “Oh, my gosh, six kids. How do you get it all done?” I’m like, “Actually, I think having more kids has protected me and kind of saved me from a lot of the pitfalls I would have fallen into.” Because it came to a point where it was not possible to do everything for everyone anymore, and so I had to get them involved. And I can’t spend too much time with any one kid or spoil them or do everything for them because it’s just there aren’t enough hours in the day.

But more importantly than that, I’m glad that I had that realization because, as I mentioned, the goal is to raise adults, not adult-sized children. So, while it wasn’t a big deal objectively for me to do the dishes and the laundry for them at a young age, it would be at some point. And so I had to figure out when would be the best time to teach them these skills and get them involved, and I realized there’s only actually one logical answer to this question that makes sense across the board. And that is we should get them involved and require this of them as soon as they’re capable of doing these things on their own if the goal is to raise responsible adults.

So I realized for me that I was doing a lot of things for my kids that they could be doing on their own, and not only was this extra stress and burden for me, it wasn’t helping them in the long run anymore either. So I decided to give my kids more freedom by giving them the opportunity to learn these skills that they needed to function on their own and to feel the consequences of them when they didn’t. And I think that, of course, every child is different, every family is different, and ability and maturity vary from child to child. Even within my own kids, I see that. Some of my kids have taken on certain jobs much earlier than others. But often, they have surprised me in how quickly and easily they could take on these things and how well they could execute even at a younger age than I expected. So, I will link in the show notes just some general guidelines I’ve used of at what age they take over which activities.

But for instance, one of my daughters learned to do her own laundry when she was four. She’s been doing it ever since. So I think we often underestimate just how amazing and capable they are. But also just to reiterate when people ask how I get it all done and what the secret is, the secret is that I don’t. We do it together. We’re all part of a team. And they are involved and they very much contribute to the family. So actually, that’s tip number 11 too is to foster a team mentality and family culture. As I started changing that with my kids and started letting go of tasks that my children were capable of, another amazing thing happened. It fostered a team mentality in our family, and they now feel great about really contributing to our family because they actually do. Their contributions are important. The things they do around the house actually matter, and they are very much part of this team.

And certainly, in that transition, I had some moments of weakness where I try to just take things back over. But now this is part of our culture, and they get to really feel like they’re important to the family, and they actually are very important to the family. I realized at this point when I was making this switch, that there are many correlations between business teams and family. And I had mastered one in business, but until that point, I had not transferred those skills to the other. So, people think I have it all together and like I just get it all done. I talk about how years ago when I was really stressed and before I kind of put all of these things I’m talking about today in place, I think I realistically came very close to a nervous breakdown.

I had an amazing team at Wellness Mama to rely on, and things were running great. We had goals and systems that helped the business run really smoothly, and I didn’t usually feel very stressed in my work life. But at home, I was trying to manage everything, like I mentioned, on my own in my head. And unlike my business systems, I was flying by the seat of my pants, and I felt the stress as a result. So, this shift of everyone in our house being able to do the task they were capable of and to build that team culture was life-changing.

On the other hand, when I was handling everything myself and I was problem-solving for my kids, I was essentially sending my kids the message that they weren’t capable of doing those things on their own. So I was worried that I was gonna burden them if I required them to do these things, but really, I was treating them like long-term incapable guests in my home and not as an essential part of our family team. And now that they know that they’re involved and they feel like their contributions really matter because they do, this has strengthened our family bond and culture and led to less stress and more time together and things like you might have heard me mentioned before, our motto, you were made to do hard things, or our focus on constantly improving and learning and moving things forward. So, that team mentality has been really amazing for us.

Tip number 12. Rely on natural consequences versus nagging. And I mentioned this earlier in passing, but I think it deserves actually its own point because the other great part of this approach to handing off skills is the built-in use of natural consequences. Like I said, for me, when my kids handled their own laundry, they run out of clean clothes, guess what? They learn the importance of doing their laundry. I don’t hold on to the stress and the emotional responsibility anymore or worry about what will happen if they don’t get it done because it’s not my responsibility.

And other examples, my kids are homeschooled, but when we travel or whatever it may be, they are capable of making their own school lunches. They’re capable of doing most of their school work on their own. If they forget either of those things, rather than me rescuing them, kids get to learn from temporary hunger or a bad grade to remember these things in the future. And I know as parents, we wanna protect them from those hardships, but long-term, there’s not gonna be someone in their life to protect them from those hardships. So, I figure it’s much better to let them learn on a smaller scale in these relatively inconsequential things like being hungry for one meal than when they’re adults. And don’t get me wrong. I get the desire to protect our kids from discomfort, but the discomfort of natural consequences can have that long-term benefit. So these are things that we hold on to the stress and responsibility of and try to protect them from but we don’t need to. And in fact, it might actually be hurting our kids.

So, here’s what I realized. When I started looking at the data on this, it was really staggering. And the statistics are that one in four college-aged students and college graduates still live at home, one in four. Psychologists talk about there’s an increasing number of adults who have trouble actually making this shift into adult life outside of their parents. And it turns out, when we look at long-term data, our kids are happier, in the long run, the earlier they learn independence. The research shows that children who have really involved parents actually can have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life than children who are allowed to learn from natural consequences and play unsupervised and build things like social skills and emotional maturity and executive function in real-life situations versus being managed by adults.

So as much as some days I wish I could just freeze time and keep my kids little and like baby age forever, they are insistent on growing up, and they need to be prepared for adult life. And as adults, we face natural consequences all the time. That’s when I really realized I had to make a switch here. No one’s protecting me from these adult…from natural consequences as an adult. And I’ve explained this to my kids. If I drive too fast, I can get a ticket. If I forget to pay a bill, the electricity can get shut down. There’s no one who’s gonna like leap in and rescue me. That’s not how life works. And they needed to be able to learn this on a small scale before the stakes were quite so high.

Like I said, natural consequences are a very much a fact of life, and in my opinion, we need to give our kids the gift of being able to learn these baby steps from a young age. So this is not a thing you’ve done, which wasn’t for me in the beginning. I kind of tried to develop a system for implementing this without creating mutiny, because if your kids aren’t used to doing all this stuff on their own and then one day you just decide they’re gonna do everything on their own, you might have mutiny in your house.

So, when I decided to stop doing things they could do on their own, I realized it wasn’t gonna happen overnight and there was probably going to be some resistance. I thought about like…during this phase, there’s a quote I saw on Pinterest that said “Some moms run a tight ship. I run a pirate ship. There’s some swearing, some drinking and a touch of mutiny from the crew I created.” And I was trying to minimize the mutiny, but I needed a process for making the transition easier. And I created a system for this. I’ll put a link to a post with more detail in the show notes. But it was a four check handoff that was really helpful in handing things off to them, making sure they were prepared to actually do it. So in order for this method to work, I had to give them the skills to be able to actually be effective at the thing I was requiring them to do, so I wasn’t just giving them failure right off the bat.

So the four steps were, first was do it for them, and I had already done that. I was pretty good at it. But I let them watch, and I had them do…like watch me do it at first, and I explained the process. Second, I would do it with them. So, we would work on it together, and they could learn and they could ask questions. Third, I would oversee them. So the first couple of times, they unloaded the dishwasher, or they vacuumed. I would stay close and watch them, and they could ask questions, and I would give them constructive feedback. And then once they had been through those steps, I let it go. So they had a plan, they knew what the task was, and it became their responsibility. And I would still check in occasionally to make sure they were doing it well, but through that, I was able to hand off a lot of household tasks and let go of the guilt of feeling like I was solely responsible for managing the house and let them really actually become part of that process as well.

Number 13. Let go of perfection. Again, easier said than done. But one of the main reasons I was holding on to doing everything is I thought I was better at it, and I didn’t want it to be done the wrong way. And it took some self-reflection and realizing that it was better to have things get done even imperfectly through shared responsibility and through teaching my kids valuable life skills than to do it myself and be stressed all the time and be a resentful mom or a stressed-out mom or a tired mom but with kids who were dressed perfectly and like didn’t have to do anything.

I learned this in business years ago actually the hard way because I was a control freak, and I say that I’m a recovering control freak and recovering perfectionist. But I went through a phase of hiring people and not letting them do anything because I thought I could do it better, and I had to learn the hard way in business that everything got much more amazing and less stressful when I started actually integrating my team for what I hired them. So when I realized I could do each of these tasks better on my own, I certainly couldn’t do all of them better if I was doing everything. That’s the case in business, and that’s certainly the case in…at home as well.

The same was true at home. I could definitely do each task better than my child could, at least at first, but at the expense of them having a calm and happy mom and at the expense of them learning independence. So, yes, a few pieces of clothing were ruined in the making of this process with some stains, but long term, this was so worth it. And I now have extremely capable kids who are extremely self-sufficient. And a lot of people who I know in real life mention this all the time, how incredibly self-sufficient my kids are, which was my goal. And that way, things around the house are getting done.

And when I spend time with my kids, I am much more calm and present. They’re much more calm and present and we get to actually nurture that relationship versus me constantly running around my head chopped off doing everything. But this also meant learning to give practical feedback on the process and telling them I was proud of them for working hard, always praising the effort, and then giving constructive feedback so they could get better and better over time.

I’ve read a lot of business books about this, kind of the idea of growth mindset and so some just practical tips that helped with this for me for getting them to want to be motivated and actually to do these things and to give feedback without hurting their feelings is to focus on a long-term positive mindset. I didn’t expect or want them to get it all right all right away. The point is to get better step-by-step. So finding the things that they did good, finding and complimenting the effort and what that was and then giving baby steps to get better each time. And that was built into our team culture and our family of constant improvement. And that way, they wouldn’t take it personally or feel like I was nagging them when I gave feedback. And also we add the word “yet.”

So when they are learning something and they’re not good at it, or I do this too when I’m learning a new skill and I’m not good at it, any time we say we’re not good at something, we always add the word “yet” at the end of the sentence, leaving the thing open that we’re going to get better at it. And also reminding my kids that when something is hard, that is the feeling of a skill…of growing, of getting better, that that resistance is often the friction leading to a positive change, so not avoiding things when things get hard, and just always like phrasing these things as areas of growth versus things that they had to do.

Tip number 14. Cultivate unstructured play and stop entertaining. And this is another area that I had to learn to make some major changes in. I think modern moms, we feel the pressure to structure and oversee every moment of our kids’ lives, and I know I did. When my kids were younger, it was a big source of stress for a long time. I didn’t actually even know where this feeling was coming from, but I felt like I should be entertaining them, playing with them, and making sure they were interacted with every moment of every day.

Everything I’ve talked about over the years, this is now one of the topics that I feel the most strongly about because I think the way we are protecting our kids is actually doing them a severe disservice in life. And the stress of that is really hard on us parents as well. So, I would kind of posit these points that are important to remember because I think unstructured play outside is one of the best things we can do for the kids. And I’ve had guests on this podcast who talked about that from a vestibular and limbic system perspective, how they need it to develop risk tolerance and to know their boundaries and also even just that outdoor like movement and running and climbing and how that develops the brain. And a lot of parents still have resistance to that. So there’s a few important points to know about this.

Statistically and drastically, the world is safer than when we were kids. We had this idea because of the news cycle and constant negativity everywhere that the world is not that safe, but the world is statistically safer than when we were kids. Secondly, supervising kids at all times does not necessarily keep them safe either. Kids can have bad things happen even when we’re watching them. Number three, there are long-term negative consequences to over structuring and overprotecting, and we are starting to see the results of this in the generation that’s now reaching adulthood. And psychiatrists are worried about this. And four, these over structured, hectic schedules are actually damaging. It can be damaging to families and create more problems. And I’ve talked about the stress of those for moms in other parts of this podcast.

So when I talk about the world being safer, I’m not just talking about that kids are less likely to die of childhood illness from previous centuries because I think that’s the default. People try to think, “Well, yeah, the world is safer because medicine’s gotten better so kids are less likely to die from all-cause mortality.” And that is somewhat true, but it is statistically also safer for kids today than it ever has been in recorded history. Kids are less likely to die or be kidnapped by…die in an accident or be kidnapped than they ever have before. So despite the fear-mongering in the media, children are less likely to be abducted, harmed, or murdered than ever before. Not only that but kids need unstructured, free play outside for vital aspects of their development.

As I mentioned earlier in this podcast, we won’t always be there to protect our kids nor should we be. And I’ve talked to a lot of friends who are teachers, all the way from grade school through college professors, and they’re saying kids are increasingly unable to solve simple problems on their own because parents intervene for everything from grades to discipline problems in school because the stakes feel so high now. And parents are even intervening in like small children having just disputes outside when they’re playing, but the result psychologically is a generation of children who still basically need their parents to decorate their dorm room or manage their life or pay their bills. And personally, I don’t want six grown-ups who’s needing me to do all that for their entire lives.

I totally get that we wanna keep our kids safe and protected, but there’s a point when we have to start letting go of some of these things for their health. So thinking about this, there’s extremely tiny chance that something bad’s gonna happen to our children if they’re playing outside. In fact, statistically, if I’m remembering off the top of my head, I think that the number was like kids would have to play outside by themselves in our front yard for 750,000 years on average to actually get kidnapped. That’s how rare it is. But on the converse of that, there’s a 0% chance of children developing any street smarts by sitting on the couch watching TV. Kids aren’t learning problem-solving or creativity by being protected from uncomfortable situations or having their conflicts solved for them.

And so like I look at this, again, a little bit mathematically of like…the pros and the cons and also mathematically, which is the risk-benefit? Where do the numbers fall? We know that kids are on technology more and more, much more so than make sure they’re playing on screens more than they ever have, and they’re spending more time inside than they ever have. In fact, even in one generation, statistically, kids today spend less than half the time outside than I did as kids, and we spent more time…less time outside than our parents did. Kids also spend over 50% of their time more looking at screens than they do playing outside.

So, strictly logically, I think this is important because sitting and watching a screen is a sedentary activity. We know childhood obesity is on the rise. But eye doctors, I’ve interviewed a couple, are seeing vision problems in children at very young ages because of staring at screens for too long. And the blue light of screens are affecting our kids’ brains and circadian rhythms, but yet a lot of parents feel it’s safer to let our kids watch TV or be on their iPad than to climb a tree or ride a bike, even though climbing a tree, riding a bike, those actually both are important things for developing their right-brain, left-brain for their vestibular system. I did a podcast with Carol of Brain Harmony actually a couple if you wanna check those out of why those things are so important.

Also, I often hear the thing about what about kids and sex trafficking. Just statistically, kids are actually way more likely to be targeted on social media and then later abducted than they are to be grabbed by a random stranger on the street. So this is our area of concern. We actually should be keeping them safe online or keeping them off of technology and not worrying about them playing in the backyard. Kids being outside actually serves also a much more important purpose than just them running around and reducing the risk of obesity, which is huge, but they’re getting fresh air.

So, I’ve talked about before how indoor air is often hundreds of times more polluted than the outdoor air. So being outside is a great way for them to get some clean air. Also, just a few minutes outside every day, kids can get the vitamin D they need for many aspects of help that is statistically tied to reduced cancer risk, to decreased mental health problems, to absorption of other vitamins, to better sleep. It’s really super important. Also, them being outside, they’re exposed to natural light. Outdoor light is so much brighter than inner light. I mentioned this with why I go outside in the morning every morning, but daytime light exposure, especially in the morning, helps regulate hormones, cortisol, and circadian rhythm. And there are studies especially on children that this can really improve sleep. So our kids need to be outside for the light.

Also, for the sensory input. So I mentioned Carol from Brain Harmony. She’s an occupational therapist, who is helping correct a lot of these problems in kids. And she mentions how important like all the normal outside activities are for babies in a lot of ways. So we keep babies upright from the very beginning in high chairs, cribs, playpens. They’re not rolling around, moving around. They’re not developing their vestibular system like they should be. They’re not outside playing in the dirt, so they’re not getting the microbial or the sensory input from the grass or from crawling or from falling down, which is actually a very important part of brain development. And what they’re seeing over time is that when kids don’t get these inputs, they get more anxiety, they’re less creative, and they have more problems as older kids when they don’t do these things.

So, the lack of vestibular system development is also leading kids to be clumsier, not have as much balance and maybe tied to sensory issues. So, all that to say kids need unstructured play, and they need it outside. And I also think it needs to be unsupervised when it can be. Here’s why. So, like I said, we’re not letting kids have control of their own lives and figure out how to navigate these things psychologically. Think about when you were a kid, the things that pushed you just beyond your comfort zone, when you were super scared of taking that job or you were climbing a tree and it got scarier. You didn’t think you could do it, and then you did, or the first time you rode a bike or climbed a rope or whatever it was. That’s an important feeling of accomplishment for kids, and it teaches them to tackle bigger goals. But we’re protecting kids from having these experiences, which makes them more afraid to tackle bigger things later in life.

And another benefit of that unstructured play is that we’re not there to rescue them every time they get their feelings hurt. And I know this is hard. As a parent, it’s so hard to see your kids get their feelings hurt. None of them like to see them feel bad but they learn so much from these experiences. And in having their feelings hurt or having rough interactions with other kids their age, they learn important lessons like, “Not everyone in the world has the same opinion as me, but I can still get along with people who have a different opinion than I do.” And we’ve probably all met adults who might need to learn that lesson too. They learn things like, “If I’m mean to other kids, they won’t wanna play with me. And also they don’t have to play with me.” And that’s an important thing that kids need to understand when the stakes are small, kids, before they’re in a job setting, and they’re not getting along with coworkers or their boss, they learn things like, “I don’t always get to play what I want or choose the activity all the time,” that group activities require compromise. Again, another huge life skill as an adult and they learn things like that.

Relationships require the ability to work through conflict and to find compromise and that it’s worth it. But when we jump in and we facilitate this kind of intensive mediation for every minor infraction, like talk about our feelings and work them through it, they don’t get to figure out how to work those things through on their own. So, I think our overabundance of extracurricular activities and our over-involvement with our kids take away these important things that are needed for childhood development. So that’s why I’m a huge fan of unstructured outdoor playtime for kids, and I know that it can be hard.

This is one of the things I prioritize the most in life, and like we actually ended up not building a house we really wanted to build because we had an environment where our kids had this. And that was so important to us. And having this leads to healthier and happier kids, and like I’ve mentioned all these psychological benefits of doing that. It’s also great for moms because then we are free of feeling like we need to entertain them at all times. We’re not being bad moms by letting them play outside on their own. That’s actually very, very important for them, and they will learn. Like, my kids build forts. They’ve worked through things with friends. They’ve created all these games. They play outside constantly. They’re getting exercise. They’re getting all the benefits of outdoor play, and they’re getting the social benefits of working through those things. It’s a little bit of a rant on the soapbox there.

Tip number 15. Master your work life. Again, this is another tough area, and it’s so different for each of us. So I’m just gonna share some kind of broad, general strategies from my own experience. My work life is extremely probably abnormal. I don’t think anything’s gonna be directly applicable, so I’m just gonna share some generalities. As a mom, though, I’ve never liked this idea of work-life balance because there’s often no separation. Even at work, we’re still thinking about our kids. Even when we’re home, we know that there’s stuff we need to do at work. We are inherent multitaskers. So, balance is not just a moving target. It’s more of a complete myth for moms.

I prefer to think of it work-life integration because we have to operate so many systems at once, all the gears need to turn in the same direction at the same time to keep things moving forward. So, I analyze work in the same type of way that I analyze home stuff, and I make sure that they all integrate well. Me personally, I work from home most days, but I also homeschool and run the household. And though I’m grateful to have grandparents close by who help with school and have an assistant who helps with some business stuff, a lot of it is still up to me. And I realized that as humans, we will fill whatever time slot we give ourselves. So since I had the freedom to largely set my schedule, I had to keep this in mind and plan as such.

I realized that I realistically only had about two to three hours a day of real work time and that I was more effective, much more effective when that time was uninterrupted in a block together. So I started scheduling this when I knew that my kids could be occupied with other tasks like school or when they’re outside playing, and I only tackle the most important work stuff during that time. So in other words, when I only have two hours to get stuff done, I can get the same amount that I used to get done in eight hours done because I’m not checking email. I’m not on social media. I’m doing the most effective things that I have to do first.

I also batch whenever possible. So there are things on my list, like, again, my work schedule’s not normal, but like podcast recording and writing, I will often stick to one type of activity like that per day and then batch it. So I will record several podcasts in a row or do a writing day. That way my brain can stay on task and tackle those tasks better. I have employed a lot of the strategies above that I talked about in this podcast to make time for work by systematizing stuff I had to get done at home, by making sure my kids had time to play outside or stuff to work on so that I could be uninterrupted the rest of the time.

But like I said, my work is pretty unusual. I don’t have a normal job with set hours. So, I’m not sure my specific system would be helpful, but a couple things that I think are universally applicable would be only check email at certain times. Don’t even have it notify you the rest of the time and handling all of them at once. So I have short 20 minutes segments when I check email and Slack, and I don’t check it the rest of the time. I also think it’s really beneficial to have systems and standard operating procedures for everything, both at home and at work. This way I can delegate when needed, and it takes all the memory and stress out of it.

And then tip number 16 is to master your mind. And this may be the toughest step, but for me, this has been…it’s made the biggest difference. It took the longest and I’m still very much a work in progress. But you might have heard that joking quote online, “It’s like no one even appreciates that I stayed up all night worrying about them.” But the mom guilt is real, and the worry is real. And I think this is something that all of us face to some degree. This was also the last one I was able to tackle effectively. My house was managed, we had systems, we had minimized, I had systems for my kitchen, for work, but cleaning out my mind was the toughest step in it. Like I said, it’s still a work in progress.

To me, it goes back to the quote from Seneca, “There’s only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things that are beyond the power of our will.” And there’s a lot in that one sentence. It’s easy to say, it’s incredibly tough to do, but it’s also so freeing if you can do it. And it’s definitely not a change you can make overnight. In this one I had like over time, it took me probably a year before I actually noticed a really drastic change in this.

It’s actually easier to think of the things that are in our control than to list the things that are not in our control. And if we boil it down, the only thing we really have control over is our own character and our own response to things that happen. We can’t control anything else. There’s another quote from Epictetus, who I think this also really applies to moms, is that man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.

And this idea that we only are in charge of our own reactions and our own will is wonderful because it gives us control. But it’s also a big responsibility when we realize that all emotions and all stress comes from within because it’s so easy to wanna look for an outside source to blame. But outside forces don’t and can’t control our feelings. So knowing this releases us from a lot of stress when we pay attention to it and manage it. We can’t control how others feel about us. So we have to learn how to let that go. We can’t control the actions of others, even our kids. So we have to let that go. We can’t control or change the past. So we have to let that go.

We can’t control or change the weather or the possibility of some horrific event or any other outside factor. All we can control are our own thoughts and emotions, and we can gain incredible freedom when we really focus on that. Again, I get it, easier said than done. Like I said, this took the longest, but some practical things that really helped me.

Every single day, focusing on gratitude. So I love to start each day thinking of things I am grateful for, and I think, in general, gratitude is the antidote to a lot of worry and stress. And so I actually make a list of these things either in my phone or in a journal, just jotting down a few things over time that’s helped my brain switch into looking for the good versus looking for the negative. And once your brain makes that switch, all of this gets so much easier.

I think it’s also important to find the things that reduce stress physically because when we’re under physical stress, mentally, we stress much more as well. Like the things I’ve talked about earlier in this podcast, when I was able to optimize exercise and sleep and supplements, that made a difference for my mindset as well.

Also, learning to distinguish the difference between problem-solving and worrying. So I started paying attention and asking myself if a certain thought pattern was productive and was gonna lead to a good outcome which is problem-solving or if I was just worrying. And if I was just worrying and this thought process was not gonna actually lead to solving the problem, then I would interrupt it. I would do something that I needed to do to change it to stop that train of thought. I would either read something else to change my thoughts, go move, go outside, and come back with a fresh perspective. That way I wasn’t wasting mental energy if I wasn’t gonna solve a problem and it was just gonna make me stressed.

And then I also learned to do something called fear-setting, which Tim Ferriss talks about, and then let go. So rather than worry about all the bad things that could happen, I would actually think them through to their worst-case scenario and then think about what would happen if I had to face that. So, in many cases, the worst-case scenario wasn’t actually that bad, and I would be able to manage it just fine. And certainly, there are things that would be like much more difficult and seem unsurmountable like the loss of a loved one or some kind of huge disaster. But I knew I couldn’t control those things and that worrying about them wasn’t going to stop them from happening.

So I went back to focusing on gratitude and being present with the people I loved in the moment. Like I said, this is still a daily work in progress for me, but over time, my mindset has so much shifted from focusing on the negative to trying to focus on the positive. And I’m able to let go of the things that are not in my control, and I’m so much less mentally stressed.

And then lastly, tip number 17. All of this points toward finding your own way and taking baby steps. And if I’ve learned one thing in the last 13 years of motherhood and in this process, it’s that what works for one person won’t always work the same for another. It took me years to find my own versions of all of these things. And I’ve shared specifics in the hopes that they will help you. But at the end of the day, we each have to create our own systems based on our own schedules, our own lives, and things that would work.

So I would say based on my experience, start with small, little baby steps that are manageable and that you know you can integrate over time and integrate them before you add more things on. So rather than try to overhaul your entire life in one day, start with you find those 80/20, find the 20% most effective and start there. Make sure that you’re getting enough sleep. If meals and food is a big stress, start with that. If it’s laundry, figure out the thing that’s gonna take away the most stress from you and start there.

I also think, and you hear me say this all the time, but that community is a huge aspect of any change. So find a group of friends or support and have that. That’ll help your mental state, that’ll help your stress level, and that will also help you stick to this if you have accountability. I’ve heard it said that we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with. So I think we need to choose these people wisely and then nurture relationships that help us become better and that we can help them become better as well. So I hope that some of the things in that were helpful.

As always, thank you for listening. If you have any follow-up questions, please post them in the show notes. That’s always at wellnessmama.fm. I will try to answer them. And this is a topic I’m going to be writing about more and more and talking about more on this podcast. So if you enjoyed, just leave questions there, and I will try to address any follow up ones in future episodes. Also, if you enjoyed this episode or any episode, I would be very grateful if you would leave an honest rating or review in whatever app you use to listen, whether that’s iTunes, Spotify, etc. This helps others to find the podcast and it helps with rankings. But as always, thank you so much for listening, for sharing your time with me today, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/time-saving-systems/

[yakiraaniaisrael-journey]

She is Tired. She is ME.

As a woman, we look at taking a break as being selfish. We may not express it as such, but it’s evident in our actions. Everything and everyone is a priority except ourselves. Constantly torn between making decisions and sacrificing. Breaking stereotypes and carrying the weight of being a super mom. 

I for one can tell you this! I don’t want to be a super mom. I don’t want a cape. I want a damn nap. 

Too often do we get sucked into the fact that if it doesn’t get done right now then we have failed. I am my biggest critic of this. (In my mind) I am so step-by-step and focused that it drives me insane when stuff just doesn’t go as planned. (Truthfully, most things do not go as I plan)... speaking of that! 

I have laundry to do- which now means going to the laundry mat, I never do my papers for school on time- because let’s be honest I ain’t got time sis- I will commend my friend for giving me the advice on doing my paper in sections...daily (I’ll try it.. thanks girl!), On the real tip balancing wife-life, motherhood, and being a full-time student and employee GOT DAMN GINAAAAAAA this is for the BIRDS! I’m barely making it lol, just holding on to God’s unchanging hand as the church folks sing... but yeah anywho... I also have a to-do list at work that continues to grow- email after email, with Per our last conversation...type of responses...  

In reality, when I step back and reflect... I really don’t plan. I am going with the flow like most of us... you know rolling with the punches.. and sis these punches are coming full throttle, right? Now, keep in mind I’m an artist and I’m sensitive about my ish, so just say right! I feel like I got some of yall shaking yall head in agreeance, with this blog tuhhnight honeyyyy...

“Work.. Work.. Work. Yeah you know I got That WORK”

Speaking of work. Why is that we go to work and will make the boss rich and then we come home poor? And poor does not have to be in the sense of monetary value. We have goals and dismiss them because something or someone else throws us off OUR course. 

Let’s say this together--> Invest in yourself sis! Invest in your family, your legacy! Now, this the ish I tell myself daily and probably have endless notebooks of tasks unfinished and goals collecting dust... don’t act like you don’t either sis and IF YOU DONT share your strategies with the village sis, so we all can WIN. 

But honey, a change is coming.

I am just being honest, telling my truth. I have a lot of working on me to do. Investing in my spirit first, my home...most importantly my man (HUSBAND), and my goals. 

And yall know I have to talk about one thing we don’t do: Self-Care....Are you There?

We limit our self-care because we just don’t have time. I know I am an honest hand raiser when I say that I slack in the self-care department. However, self-care is more than brushing your hair, taking a shower, and dollying yourself up. 

Self-care is taking a break, defining yourself, reinventing the wheel, appreciating your growth, setting goals, reflecting on what happened and what didn’t and why, acknowledging the changes you went through and recognizing what you need and figuring out what voice you need to get it done! 

Today’s Comeback Takeaway:

Let your hair down, sis, 

breathe and regroup. 

Love yourself with everything you have... on purpose. 

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/seo/open-source-design-claiming-ownership-over-design-conventions/

Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions

Design sameness

Inspiration is at the heart of design. When we – as designers – try to solve a problem we tend to look at what others do. We are often tempted to copy what other companies or websites are doing. This because of their authority: “I’m following Material Design to the letter because Google made it.”. Or because stakeholders point us in that direction: “I want that thing that Airbnb uses on its website.”.

This has led to a point where the entire web starts to look the same (well, kind of). In my opinion, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with this so-called ‘design sameness’. It’s ok to be inspired and I personally don’t really care that so many websites look alike.

pic.twitter.com/vmpGzKg5kb

— ᴠᴀɴ sᴄʜɴᴇɪᴅᴇʀ (@vanschneider) October 21, 2018

The danger – in my opinion – lies in the often heard reasoning that designers make decisions because they follow design conventions. And in doing so, they think they’re putting their users first. But, do they really? What exactly are these conventions? Where do they come from? And why do we so eagerly hide behind them?

To help answer these questions, I dove into some of my research from when I was studying spatial planning. I found out that concepts from the domain of public decision-making apply fairly well to the design domain as well.

In this article, I want to walk you through these concepts and the tension field that is present in decision-making. The tension between the complexity and diversity of the context in which we make decisions, on the one hand. And concepts of universally accepted norms (like the public interest and conventions), on the other hand. I also want to try and propose how we can reshape the concept of convention. To claim ownership over it for the use in our design practices.

The public interest as an analogy for design convention

‘The public interest’ is a concept stemming from the domain of governance and public decision-making. And I think that it works very well as an analogy in the domain of design. In the sense that it is very similar to the way us designers tend to use conventions in our work.

In public decision-making, we have two ways of dealing with the public interest:

A substantive way (meaning we treat it as ‘the greater good’, as an abstract norm that decision-makers strive for) A procedural way (meaning it’s a product of different insights and claims shaped through dialogue)

The distinction lies in a top-down versus a bottom-up approach to decision-making. It’s this substantive, top-down approach that I want to highlight at this point. It reminds us of our attitude towards conventions in design. Accepting the existence of a concept in our practice that is so abstract and elusive holds a danger. It can be used (or abused) by decision-makers to legitimize their decisions: “Our policy is in the public interest, so it benefits everybody.”. Design convention works somewhat the same way. It basically says: “Everybody’s using this, so it must work.”

“In its most limited sense ‘public interest’ is used to express approval, approbation or commendation of public policy.”

R.E. Flathman (1966) Pluriformity

Utilitarian philosophy and liberalism (which center around the individual) argue that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the above reasoning. Namely, the total lack of care about individual needs. And this is odd (to say the least), considering we live in a world that is both complex and diverse. This diversity is called pluriformity. It means that there is recognition for different ideologies, cultures and political preferences. And the norms, values and interests associated with it. The concept is therefore often associated with the rejection of the existence of universal norms.

If we translate this to our design domain, we can argue that it is unlikely that universal solutions exist. At least in practice. Considering the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which problems occur. It seems that the public interest is used as a legitimization for decision-making. Just as convention is used to hide behind the fact that the design lacks research and critical thinking.

Tried and true conventions

Yes, it is a much heard argument that trends and conventions actually do exist in design. We might even need them for our users to understand how our websites work (the most famous example probably being the hamburger menu icon). But how did these conventions originate? That is a fundamental question, that I believe doesn’t get asked enough. The problem with ‘getting inspired’ or ‘following convention’, is that you lack context about problem definition and – solution. We risk losing ourselves in studying the solution and lose track of what the initial problem was.

This leads to information gaps, as Stephen Hay, Head of UX at Catawiki, so strikingly described it in his presentation about design sameness at this years’ Refresh Conference (which served as an immense inspiration for this article). It means that, with each blind application of a convention, problem and solution drift further apart. The problem gets, sort of, lost in translation.

The most striking example of design convention going haywire is probably the use of sliders on the web. You can read our opinion on sliders here.

Isolate the problem with critical thinking

This doesn’t mean that we have to fully reject the concept of convention. Problems re-occur and are not always unique in nature. And not every solution needs to be different or unique. I dare even say that every problem that you face as a designer, has probably already been faced by someone else. Even if you consider the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which we work.

But what’s critical, is that you first isolate and define the specific problem that you’re facing. And only then move on to the solution. Blindly using a convention as a solution without exactly knowing what it is you’re trying to solve, is simply wrong. Stephen Hay argues that relying on conventions is cutting corners. Especially, considering critical thinking is one of the biggest assets you possess as a designer. Therefore it’s essential that you use just that.

“We rely on conventions because they will often give us an acceptable solution with a minimum of effort.”

Stephen Hay (2018) The fear of isolation leading to waste

We’ve arrived at a moral crossroad…

Although I very much encourage Hay’s plea for critical thinking. And although I understand the value of isolating the problem you are trying to solve. I also think in doing so, there’s a lurking danger of isolating yourself. Of forcing yourself to come up with something original, different and unique. And in doing so you risk your process becoming a costly effort. Wasteful even. Because, what if every designer tries to fix every problem over, and over again? It would feel like we’re constantly reinventing the wheel. That’s why I opt for actively claiming ownership over conventions.

We think that the open source model is able to prevent wasteful processes. How? Read more about it here.

Scale down and claim ownership over convention

Let me take you back to the domain of public decision-making and the aforementioned public interest. While we’ve established the trouble with treating the public interest as a given. The concept actually is – in a procedural sense – existent and is something that we can control and claim ownership over.

“The public interest is the compromise that comes about with regard to the policy, with the help of the actors involved, within the boundaries of the project.”

Ernest R. Alexander (1992)

It is something that can originate as a solution to a problem that is defined through dialogue. This, within an enclosed context. But, for this to happen we need designers to come together and:

share the problems they face, and; share the solutions they come up with

What this means is that we need an arena (just like politicians and decision-makers do). An arena where designers come together and debate the problems they face. And for this to really work it’s critical that the context in which problems (and solutions) occur is also shared. This, to the end that designers can learn from each other. Learn to identify situations more easily. And find fitting solutions more quickly. This, to avoid the risk of getting stuck in a wasteful process.

This way we can turn the concept of convention from something that magically applies to all similar problems, into a commonality. A commonality that’s actually shaped by designers and applicable within a well defined context.

The open source design arena

But how do we create this arena and bring these designers together? Actually, these arenas exist all over the web. They’re called communities. Whether they’re platforms like Behance, Dribbble, GitHub (or even Twitter and Facebook). Get-togethers like Meetup. Or movements like the Open Design Foundation. They all have the potential to bring designers together and discuss design.

This is what I love about @Dribbble and why I think the comment section should be more prominent. Designers coming together on @lobanovskiy‘s latest shot to find solutions: https://t.co/aAnDZGxPFx

— Mathijs

(@MathijsLemmers) August 23, 2018

I’m a firm believer in the concept of open source design as presented in a manifesto by Garth Braithwaite. It lies at the heart of everything this article discusses. And it’s something that we, at Yoast, firmly believe in. It’s about us designers actively participating in discussion. About helping each other by sharing our work. About sharing the context in which we work and the problems we’re facing. And about sharing the solutions we find within this context.

This, to the end that we, designers, look further than just ‘getting inspired’ and seeking individual advancement. But are really able to claim ownership over our work and start creating meaningful conventions and conversations. And, through this, help push design forward.

The post Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions appeared first on Yoast.

Read more: yoast.com

[elenaturnerge]

Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions

Design sameness

Inspiration is at the heart of design. When we – as designers – try to solve a problem we tend to look at what others do. We are often tempted to copy what other companies or websites are doing. This because of their authority: “I’m following Material Design to the letter because Google made it.”. Or because stakeholders point us in that direction: “I want that thing that Airbnb uses on its website.”.

This has led to a point where the entire web starts to look the same (well, kind of). In my opinion, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with this so-called ‘design sameness’. It’s ok to be inspired and I personally don’t really care that so many websites look alike.

pic.twitter.com/vmpGzKg5kb

— ᴠᴀɴ sᴄʜɴᴇɪᴅᴇʀ (@vanschneider) October 21, 2018

The danger – in my opinion – lies in the often heard reasoning that designers make decisions because they follow design conventions. And in doing so, they think they’re putting their users first. But, do they really? What exactly are these conventions? Where do they come from? And why do we so eagerly hide behind them?

To help answer these questions, I dove into some of my research from when I was studying spatial planning. I found out that concepts from the domain of public decision-making apply fairly well to the design domain as well.

In this article, I want to walk you through these concepts and the tension field that is present in decision-making. The tension between the complexity and diversity of the context in which we make decisions, on the one hand. And concepts of universally accepted norms (like the public interest and conventions), on the other hand. I also want to try and propose how we can reshape the concept of convention. To claim ownership over it for the use in our design practices.

The public interest as an analogy for design convention

‘The public interest’ is a concept stemming from the domain of governance and public decision-making. And I think that it works very well as an analogy in the domain of design. In the sense that it is very similar to the way us designers tend to use conventions in our work.

In public decision-making, we have two ways of dealing with the public interest:

A substantive way (meaning we treat it as ‘the greater good’, as an abstract norm that decision-makers strive for)

A procedural way (meaning it’s a product of different insights and claims shaped through dialogue)

The distinction lies in a top-down versus a bottom-up approach to decision-making. It’s this substantive, top-down approach that I want to highlight at this point. It reminds us of our attitude towards conventions in design. Accepting the existence of a concept in our practice that is so abstract and elusive holds a danger. It can be used (or abused) by decision-makers to legitimize their decisions: “Our policy is in the public interest, so it benefits everybody.”. Design convention works somewhat the same way. It basically says: “Everybody’s using this, so it must work.”

“In its most limited sense ‘public interest’ is used to express approval, approbation or commendation of public policy.”

R.E. Flathman (1966)

Pluriformity

Utilitarian philosophy and liberalism (which center around the individual) argue that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the above reasoning. Namely, the total lack of care about individual needs. And this is odd (to say the least), considering we live in a world that is both complex and diverse. This diversity is called pluriformity. It means that there is recognition for different ideologies, cultures and political preferences. And the norms, values and interests associated with it. The concept is therefore often associated with the rejection of the existence of universal norms.

If we translate this to our design domain, we can argue that it is unlikely that universal solutions exist. At least in practice. Considering the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which problems occur. It seems that the public interest is used as a legitimization for decision-making. Just as convention is used to hide behind the fact that the design lacks research and critical thinking.

Tried and true conventions

Yes, it is a much heard argument that trends and conventions actually do exist in design. We might even need them for our users to understand how our websites work (the most famous example probably being the hamburger menu icon). But how did these conventions originate? That is a fundamental question, that I believe doesn’t get asked enough. The problem with ‘getting inspired’ or ‘following convention’, is that you lack context about problem definition and – solution. We risk losing ourselves in studying the solution and lose track of what the initial problem was.

This leads to information gaps, as Stephen Hay, Head of UX at Catawiki, so strikingly described it in his presentation about design sameness at this years’ Refresh Conference (which served as an immense inspiration for this article). It means that, with each blind application of a convention, problem and solution drift further apart. The problem gets, sort of, lost in translation.

The most striking example of design convention going haywire is probably the use of sliders on the web. You can read our opinion on sliders here.

Isolate the problem with critical thinking

This doesn’t mean that we have to fully reject the concept of convention. Problems re-occur and are not always unique in nature. And not every solution needs to be different or unique. I dare even say that every problem that you face as a designer, has probably already been faced by someone else. Even if you consider the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which we work.

But what’s critical, is that you first isolate and define the specific problem that you’re facing. And only then move on to the solution. Blindly using a convention as a solution without exactly knowing what it is you’re trying to solve, is simply wrong. Stephen Hay argues that relying on conventions is cutting corners. Especially, considering critical thinking is one of the biggest assets you possess as a designer. Therefore it’s essential that you use just that.

“We rely on conventions because they will often give us an acceptable solution with a minimum of effort.”

Stephen Hay (2018)

The fear of isolation leading to waste

We’ve arrived at a moral crossroad…

Although I very much encourage Hay’s plea for critical thinking. And although I understand the value of isolating the problem you are trying to solve. I also think in doing so, there’s a lurking danger of isolating yourself. Of forcing yourself to come up with something original, different and unique. And in doing so you risk your process becoming a costly effort. Wasteful even. Because, what if every designer tries to fix every problem over, and over again? It would feel like we’re constantly reinventing the wheel. That’s why I opt for actively claiming ownership over conventions.

We think that the open source model is able to prevent wasteful processes. How? Read more about it here.

Scale down and claim ownership over convention

Let me take you back to the domain of public decision-making and the aforementioned public interest. While we’ve established the trouble with treating the public interest as a given. The concept actually is – in a procedural sense – existent and is something that we can control and claim ownership over.

“The public interest is the compromise that comes about with regard to the policy, with the help of the actors involved, within the boundaries of the project.”

Ernest R. Alexander (1992)

It is something that can originate as a solution to a problem that is defined through dialogue. This, within an enclosed context. But, for this to happen we need designers to come together and:

share the problems they face, and;

share the solutions they come up with

What this means is that we need an arena (just like politicians and decision-makers do). An arena where designers come together and debate the problems they face. And for this to really work it’s critical that the context in which problems (and solutions) occur is also shared. This, to the end that designers can learn from each other. Learn to identify situations more easily. And find fitting solutions more quickly. This, to avoid the risk of getting stuck in a wasteful process.

This way we can turn the concept of convention from something that magically applies to all similar problems, into a commonality. A commonality that’s actually shaped by designers and applicable within a well defined context.

The open source design arena

But how do we create this arena and bring these designers together? Actually, these arenas exist all over the web. They’re called communities. Whether they’re platforms like Behance, Dribbble, GitHub (or even Twitter and Facebook). Get-togethers like Meetup. Or movements like the Open Design Foundation. They all have the potential to bring designers together and discuss design.

This is what I love about @Dribbble and why I think the comment section should be more prominent. Designers coming together on @lobanovskiy's latest shot to find solutions: https://t.co/aAnDZGxPFx

— Mathijs

(@MathijsLemmers) August 23, 2018

I’m a firm believer in the concept of open source design as presented in a manifesto by Garth Braithwaite. It lies at the heart of everything this article discusses. And it’s something that we, at Yoast, firmly believe in. It’s about us designers actively participating in discussion. About helping each other by sharing our work. About sharing the context in which we work and the problems we’re facing. And about sharing the solutions we find within this context.

This, to the end that we, designers, look further than just ‘getting inspired’ and seeking individual advancement. But are really able to claim ownership over our work and start creating meaningful conventions and conversations. And, through this, help push design forward.

The post Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions appeared first on Yoast.

http://bit.ly/2DHkf0u

[elenaturnerge1]

Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions

Design sameness

Inspiration is at the heart of design. When we – as designers – try to solve a problem we tend to look at what others do. We are often tempted to copy what other companies or websites are doing. This because of their authority: “I’m following Material Design to the letter because Google made it.”. Or because stakeholders point us in that direction: “I want that thing that Airbnb uses on its website.”.

This has led to a point where the entire web starts to look the same (well, kind of). In my opinion, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with this so-called ‘design sameness’. It’s ok to be inspired and I personally don’t really care that so many websites look alike.

pic.twitter.com/vmpGzKg5kb

— ᴠᴀɴ sᴄʜɴᴇɪᴅᴇʀ (@vanschneider) October 21, 2018

The danger – in my opinion – lies in the often heard reasoning that designers make decisions because they follow design conventions. And in doing so, they think they’re putting their users first. But, do they really? What exactly are these conventions? Where do they come from? And why do we so eagerly hide behind them?

To help answer these questions, I dove into some of my research from when I was studying spatial planning. I found out that concepts from the domain of public decision-making apply fairly well to the design domain as well.

In this article, I want to walk you through these concepts and the tension field that is present in decision-making. The tension between the complexity and diversity of the context in which we make decisions, on the one hand. And concepts of universally accepted norms (like the public interest and conventions), on the other hand. I also want to try and propose how we can reshape the concept of convention. To claim ownership over it for the use in our design practices.

The public interest as an analogy for design convention

‘The public interest’ is a concept stemming from the domain of governance and public decision-making. And I think that it works very well as an analogy in the domain of design. In the sense that it is very similar to the way us designers tend to use conventions in our work.

In public decision-making, we have two ways of dealing with the public interest:

A substantive way (meaning we treat it as ‘the greater good’, as an abstract norm that decision-makers strive for)

A procedural way (meaning it’s a product of different insights and claims shaped through dialogue)

The distinction lies in a top-down versus a bottom-up approach to decision-making. It’s this substantive, top-down approach that I want to highlight at this point. It reminds us of our attitude towards conventions in design. Accepting the existence of a concept in our practice that is so abstract and elusive holds a danger. It can be used (or abused) by decision-makers to legitimize their decisions: “Our policy is in the public interest, so it benefits everybody.”. Design convention works somewhat the same way. It basically says: “Everybody’s using this, so it must work.”

“In its most limited sense ‘public interest’ is used to express approval, approbation or commendation of public policy.”

R.E. Flathman (1966)

Pluriformity

Utilitarian philosophy and liberalism (which center around the individual) argue that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the above reasoning. Namely, the total lack of care about individual needs. And this is odd (to say the least), considering we live in a world that is both complex and diverse. This diversity is called pluriformity. It means that there is recognition for different ideologies, cultures and political preferences. And the norms, values and interests associated with it. The concept is therefore often associated with the rejection of the existence of universal norms.

If we translate this to our design domain, we can argue that it is unlikely that universal solutions exist. At least in practice. Considering the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which problems occur. It seems that the public interest is used as a legitimization for decision-making. Just as convention is used to hide behind the fact that the design lacks research and critical thinking.

Tried and true conventions

Yes, it is a much heard argument that trends and conventions actually do exist in design. We might even need them for our users to understand how our websites work (the most famous example probably being the hamburger menu icon). But how did these conventions originate? That is a fundamental question, that I believe doesn’t get asked enough. The problem with ‘getting inspired’ or ‘following convention’, is that you lack context about problem definition and – solution. We risk losing ourselves in studying the solution and lose track of what the initial problem was.

This leads to information gaps, as Stephen Hay, Head of UX at Catawiki, so strikingly described it in his presentation about design sameness at this years’ Refresh Conference (which served as an immense inspiration for this article). It means that, with each blind application of a convention, problem and solution drift further apart. The problem gets, sort of, lost in translation.

The most striking example of design convention going haywire is probably the use of sliders on the web. You can read our opinion on sliders here.

Isolate the problem with critical thinking

This doesn’t mean that we have to fully reject the concept of convention. Problems re-occur and are not always unique in nature. And not every solution needs to be different or unique. I dare even say that every problem that you face as a designer, has probably already been faced by someone else. Even if you consider the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which we work.

But what’s critical, is that you first isolate and define the specific problem that you’re facing. And only then move on to the solution. Blindly using a convention as a solution without exactly knowing what it is you’re trying to solve, is simply wrong. Stephen Hay argues that relying on conventions is cutting corners. Especially, considering critical thinking is one of the biggest assets you possess as a designer. Therefore it’s essential that you use just that.

“We rely on conventions because they will often give us an acceptable solution with a minimum of effort.”

Stephen Hay (2018)

The fear of isolation leading to waste

We’ve arrived at a moral crossroad…

Although I very much encourage Hay’s plea for critical thinking. And although I understand the value of isolating the problem you are trying to solve. I also think in doing so, there’s a lurking danger of isolating yourself. Of forcing yourself to come up with something original, different and unique. And in doing so you risk your process becoming a costly effort. Wasteful even. Because, what if every designer tries to fix every problem over, and over again? It would feel like we’re constantly reinventing the wheel. That’s why I opt for actively claiming ownership over conventions.

We think that the open source model is able to prevent wasteful processes. How? Read more about it here.

Scale down and claim ownership over convention

Let me take you back to the domain of public decision-making and the aforementioned public interest. While we’ve established the trouble with treating the public interest as a given. The concept actually is – in a procedural sense – existent and is something that we can control and claim ownership over.

“The public interest is the compromise that comes about with regard to the policy, with the help of the actors involved, within the boundaries of the project.”

Ernest R. Alexander (1992)

It is something that can originate as a solution to a problem that is defined through dialogue. This, within an enclosed context. But, for this to happen we need designers to come together and:

share the problems they face, and;

share the solutions they come up with

What this means is that we need an arena (just like politicians and decision-makers do). An arena where designers come together and debate the problems they face. And for this to really work it’s critical that the context in which problems (and solutions) occur is also shared. This, to the end that designers can learn from each other. Learn to identify situations more easily. And find fitting solutions more quickly. This, to avoid the risk of getting stuck in a wasteful process.

This way we can turn the concept of convention from something that magically applies to all similar problems, into a commonality. A commonality that’s actually shaped by designers and applicable within a well defined context.

The open source design arena

But how do we create this arena and bring these designers together? Actually, these arenas exist all over the web. They’re called communities. Whether they’re platforms like Behance, Dribbble, GitHub (or even Twitter and Facebook). Get-togethers like Meetup. Or movements like the Open Design Foundation. They all have the potential to bring designers together and discuss design.

This is what I love about @Dribbble and why I think the comment section should be more prominent. Designers coming together on @lobanovskiy's latest shot to find solutions: https://t.co/aAnDZGxPFx

— Mathijs

(@MathijsLemmers) August 23, 2018

I’m a firm believer in the concept of open source design as presented in a manifesto by Garth Braithwaite. It lies at the heart of everything this article discusses. And it’s something that we, at Yoast, firmly believe in. It’s about us designers actively participating in discussion. About helping each other by sharing our work. About sharing the context in which we work and the problems we’re facing. And about sharing the solutions we find within this context.

This, to the end that we, designers, look further than just ‘getting inspired’ and seeking individual advancement. But are really able to claim ownership over our work and start creating meaningful conventions and conversations. And, through this, help push design forward.

The post Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions appeared first on Yoast.

http://bit.ly/2DHkf0u

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Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions

Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions Design sameness

Inspiration is at the heart of design. When we – as designers – try to solve a problem we tend to look at what others do. We are often tempted to copy what other companies or websites are doing. This because of their authority: “I’m following Material Design to the letter because Google made it.”. Or because stakeholders point us in that direction: “I want that thing that Airbnb uses on its website.”.

This has led to a point where the entire web starts to look the same (well, kind of). In my opinion, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with this so-called ‘design sameness’. It’s ok to be inspired and I personally don’t really care that so many websites look alike.

pic.twitter.com/vmpGzKg5kb

— ᴠᴀɴ sᴄʜɴᴇɪᴅᴇʀ (@vanschneider) October 21, 2018

The danger – in my opinion – lies in the often heard reasoning that designers make decisions because they follow design conventions. And in doing so, they think they’re putting their users first. But, do they really? What exactly are these conventions? Where do they come from? And why do we so eagerly hide behind them?

To help answer these questions, I dove into some of my research from when I was studying spatial planning. I found out that concepts from the domain of public decision-making apply fairly well to the design domain as well.

In this article, I want to walk you through these concepts and the tension field that is present in decision-making. The tension between the complexity and diversity of the context in which we make decisions, on the one hand. And concepts of universally accepted norms (like the public interest and conventions), on the other hand. I also want to try and propose how we can reshape the concept of convention. To claim ownership over it for the use in our design practices.

The public interest as an analogy for design convention

‘The public interest’ is a concept stemming from the domain of governance and public decision-making. And I think that it works very well as an analogy in the domain of design. In the sense that it is very similar to the way us designers tend to use conventions in our work.

In public decision-making, we have two ways of dealing with the public interest:

A substantive way (meaning we treat it as ‘the greater good’, as an abstract norm that decision-makers strive for)

A procedural way (meaning it’s a product of different insights and claims shaped through dialogue)

The distinction lies in a top-down versus a bottom-up approach to decision-making. It’s this substantive, top-down approach that I want to highlight at this point. It reminds us of our attitude towards conventions in design. Accepting the existence of a concept in our practice that is so abstract and elusive holds a danger. It can be used (or abused) by decision-makers to legitimize their decisions: “Our policy is in the public interest, so it benefits everybody.”. Design convention works somewhat the same way. It basically says: “Everybody’s using this, so it must work.”

“In its most limited sense ‘public interest’ is used to express approval, approbation or commendation of public policy.”

R.E. Flathman (1966)

Pluriformity

Utilitarian philosophy and liberalism (which center around the individual) argue that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the above reasoning. Namely, the total lack of care about individual needs. And this is odd (to say the least), considering we live in a world that is both complex and diverse. This diversity is called pluriformity. It means that there is recognition for different ideologies, cultures and political preferences. And the norms, values and interests associated with it. The concept is therefore often associated with the rejection of the existence of universal norms.

If we translate this to our design domain, we can argue that it is unlikely that universal solutions exist. At least in practice. Considering the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which problems occur. It seems that the public interest is used as a legitimization for decision-making. Just as convention is used to hide behind the fact that the design lacks research and critical thinking.

Tried and true conventions

Yes, it is a much heard argument that trends and conventions actually do exist in design. We might even need them for our users to understand how our websites work (the most famous example probably being the hamburger menu icon). But how did these conventions originate? That is a fundamental question, that I believe doesn’t get asked enough. The problem with ‘getting inspired’ or ‘following convention’, is that you lack context about problem definition and – solution. We risk losing ourselves in studying the solution and lose track of what the initial problem was.

This leads to information gaps, as Stephen Hay, Head of UX at Catawiki, so strikingly described it in his presentation about design sameness at this years’ Refresh Conference (which served as an immense inspiration for this article). It means that, with each blind application of a convention, problem and solution drift further apart. The problem gets, sort of, lost in translation.

The most striking example of design convention going haywire is probably the use of sliders on the web. You can read our opinion on sliders here.

Isolate the problem with critical thinking

This doesn’t mean that we have to fully reject the concept of convention. Problems re-occur and are not always unique in nature. And not every solution needs to be different or unique. I dare even say that every problem that you face as a designer, has probably already been faced by someone else. Even if you consider the diversity and complexity of the different contexts in which we work.

But what’s critical, is that you first isolate and define the specific problem that you’re facing. And only then move on to the solution. Blindly using a convention as a solution without exactly knowing what it is you’re trying to solve, is simply wrong. Stephen Hay argues that relying on conventions is cutting corners. Especially, considering critical thinking is one of the biggest assets you possess as a designer. Therefore it’s essential that you use just that.

“We rely on conventions because they will often give us an acceptable solution with a minimum of effort.”

Stephen Hay (2018)

The fear of isolation leading to waste

We’ve arrived at a moral crossroad…

Although I very much encourage Hay’s plea for critical thinking. And although I understand the value of isolating the problem you are trying to solve. I also think in doing so, there’s a lurking danger of isolating yourself. Of forcing yourself to come up with something original, different and unique. And in doing so you risk your process becoming a costly effort. Wasteful even. Because, what if every designer tries to fix every problem over, and over again? It would feel like we’re constantly reinventing the wheel. That’s why I opt for actively claiming ownership over conventions.

We think that the open source model is able to prevent wasteful processes. How? Read more about it here.

Scale down and claim ownership over convention

Let me take you back to the domain of public decision-making and the aforementioned public interest. While we’ve established the trouble with treating the public interest as a given. The concept actually is – in a procedural sense – existent and is something that we can control and claim ownership over.

“The public interest is the compromise that comes about with regard to the policy, with the help of the actors involved, within the boundaries of the project.”

Ernest R. Alexander (1992)

It is something that can originate as a solution to a problem that is defined through dialogue. This, within an enclosed context. But, for this to happen we need designers to come together and:

share the problems they face, and;

share the solutions they come up with

What this means is that we need an arena (just like politicians and decision-makers do). An arena where designers come together and debate the problems they face. And for this to really work it’s critical that the context in which problems (and solutions) occur is also shared. This, to the end that designers can learn from each other. Learn to identify situations more easily. And find fitting solutions more quickly. This, to avoid the risk of getting stuck in a wasteful process.

This way we can turn the concept of convention from something that magically applies to all similar problems, into a commonality. A commonality that’s actually shaped by designers and applicable within a well defined context.

The open source design arena

But how do we create this arena and bring these designers together? Actually, these arenas exist all over the web. They’re called communities. Whether they’re platforms like Behance, Dribbble, GitHub (or even Twitter and Facebook). Get-togethers like Meetup. Or movements like the Open Design Foundation. They all have the potential to bring designers together and discuss design.

This is what I love about @Dribbble and why I think the comment section should be more prominent. Designers coming together on @lobanovskiy's latest shot to find solutions: https://t.co/aAnDZGxPFx

— Mathijs

(@MathijsLemmers) August 23, 2018

I’m a firm believer in the concept of open source design as presented in a manifesto by Garth Braithwaite. It lies at the heart of everything this article discusses. And it’s something that we, at Yoast, firmly believe in. It’s about us designers actively participating in discussion. About helping each other by sharing our work. About sharing the context in which we work and the problems we’re facing. And about sharing the solutions we find within this context.

This, to the end that we, designers, look further than just ‘getting inspired’ and seeking individual advancement. But are really able to claim ownership over our work and start creating meaningful conventions and conversations. And, through this, help push design forward.

The post Open source design: claiming ownership over design conventions appeared first on Yoast.

http://bit.ly/2DHkf0u