What’s Working, What’s Not, & the Systems That are Saving Me

• 🌟 I landed my first high-ticket client and earned my first $1k in my new business (a full web design project!) and officially left the “employee” title behind. I'm stepping fully into my solopreneur era at long last.

• 🧹 My decluttering journey is actually working, and I can already see major improvements in how my space looks and feels to me. Things are beginning to feel less heavy.

• 🧠 I've been experimenting to find frameworks that better suit my brain and energy as I work to balance it all, and my Notion system is evolving to meet me where I am- helping me reset, regulate, and refocus.

• 😬 Content creation stalled. I tried batch-creating 10 blog outlines... and ended up stuck in analysis paralysis.
  On top of working on the freelance web design project, attempting to batch-create content (when I hadn't previously done so) backfired and resulted in overwhelm and decision fatigue- the exact opposite of my intentions.

• ⚖️ Health goals have been hard to prioritize.
  Between seasonal illnesses making the rounds and trying to navigate which foods and activities trigger my symptoms to flare up, every day is a new adventure. I’m still in medical limbo, but I have my first appointment with a new endocrinologist coming up soon.

• 👯‍♀️ Fun and friendships haven’t been front and center. I really want to make more time for creative hobbies and to get outside more regularly to unplug and recharge. I’ve been making weekend plans with my son, but this area will get more love as our Canadian spring weather improves and during summer break.

The content batching plan? A well-intentioned disaster. I thought outlining 10 posts would remove friction... but it actually created friction.

The thought was that I would have a collection of pre-outlined blog post options to write from and that this would make it super easy to start writing because I wouldn’t have to start from scratch with a blank page every single time I sat down to write, the ideas and structure would already be there.

Instead, I was overwhelmed by choice and uninspired to write any of them. Which you might think is a silly problem, “just decide”- which is what I kept saying to myself.

Executive dysfunction? Maybe. (Something else I’m going to have to explore with my doctor.)

But it led to a major a-ha moment:

✨ Over-planning doesn’t equal productivity. Calm systems do.

So, I’ve shifted my strategy. Here’s how:

Sometimes my excitement and ambitious nature has gotten the best of me and I'd look at my big goals and think I needed to accomplish them all simultaneously and as fast as possible, only to crash and burn when I no longer had the bandwidth to complete them. That was survival energy, not thriving energy.

Now, rather than making overly-ambitious plans and filling my calendar with to-dos based on what I wish I could do on my best day, I'm now planning for what I can do consistently- even on low-energy days.

Here’s how I’ve restructured everything inside my Notion planner:

• I start with my big picture vision for the next 3 years.

• Identify my big goals for this year.

• Each one is categorized and broken down into quarterly → monthly → weekly goals.

• For each timeframe I ask: What’s the minimum I’d be happy with completing?

For example:

This system keeps me focused, realistic, and regulated. My calendar is no longer cluttered with a thousand wishful to-dos causing anxiety and overwhelm.

It’s aligned with my real capacity right now, and it's important to remember that capacity shifts and changes with continued practice and with whatever season I'm currently in.

After uncluttering my main dashboard of all the tasks that were overwhelming my view, now I'm just keeping the most important scheduled tasks visible at any one time. Then I clarified my projects.

Now, each project in my dashboard has:

• A focused scope

• A list of relevant, broken-down tasks

• Monthly + weekly mini-milestones

This way, instead of having one giant overwhelming to-do list of every single thing I think I need to do right now, I have a nice focused system that acts more as a series of a mini-menus I get to work from when it’s time to zoom in. Each with it's own minimum-viable milestones and checkpoints along the way. Checking them off gives me the dopamine boost of knowing I'm actually making progress towards my goals.

This gives me clarity, not chaos. It’s not about doing everything all at once- it’s about knowing what actually matters right now.

Here’s a visual look at how I’ve redesigned my system in Notion: