💪 Starting Again (Again)

Turns out the real challenge isn’t stopping ...

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve started and stopped a newsletter over the last 5 years. Every time I start I tell myself this time is going to be different. This time I’ll stick with it. This time I won’t quit.

But spoiler alert - every single time, I do quit.

And every single time I regret stopping.

I guess it’s not the stopping that’s the issue. It’s the fact that I don’t start again.

Missing a week turns into missing 2 weeks and then 3 and before you know it, I forget I even had a newsletter to write.

I don’t mind missing a week or two. I don’t even mind it not being a consistent weekly newsletter. But I do mind completely forgetting about it.

The bottom line is that I want to consistently write something. I want to document more of my life.

Why I Stopped ✋

So I had a think about what it is that stops me from sitting down to write each week, and it seems as though I inevitably put pressure on myself.

My ‘thought of the week’ isn’t useful enough. It isn’t long enough to be a newsletter. Did anything interesting even happen this week?

There’s also a part of me that feels a pressure to write about only my side hustle journey because I called this newsletter ‘Detour Diaries’. I don’t even think that fully makes sense, but I seem to have decided that’s part of the problem ha 🫠

And finally, I just over-complicated the process. I tried to overthink each post (shock horror), systemise my ‘Update Log’ and even added a ‘Consumption Log’ - but this was such a pain for me to do and totally unnecessary.

How to Make it Better 🚀

Now that I’d realised what stopped me (however stupid those reasons), I started to think about how I could make this a frictionless process. What would make it easy and fun?

As always, it was just lowering the bar:

1. Keep it short and sweet - I know that I can bang out 300 words, no problem and this doesn’t have to be any more than that (I think I’ve spoken about this before, but I’m just repeating it to myself now 😬)

2. Write about any one thing from the week - something that I learnt or just something that happened. It doesn’t have to have a moral in there. It doesn’t have to be some a-ha moment. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be that interesting (sorry in advance to anyone that actually reads this - please feel free to unsubscribe now 😂)

So here I am, restarting for what feels like the 100th time. The plan is to sit down every Monday, write for 30 mins and just post.

This time though, I’m not telling myself it’s going to be different, because let’s be honest, it’s highly likely life will happen and I’ll stop. This time I just really want to get better at restarting when that happens.

(P.S. I’m thinking of changing the name of the newsletter so any suggestions welcome 😊)

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Photo of the Week

Went to watch Hercules with the gang this weekend 🎭