Sequencing

I’m a huge fan of Michelle Warner’s Sequence Over Strategy podcast. Her newsletter is great, too. She chooses stories from her own life to illustrate her main points about business design.

Doing things in the right order is more important than doing them perfectly.

She also emphasizes understanding what each aspect of your business is supposed to do. Is public speaking a service you are selling? Or is it a means to meet people who could become clients? Only by knowing what something is supposed to do, can we even begin to assess whether it is working for us, and if not, how we might fix it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I always make things too complicated in my head.

This blog, for example, it’s like the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The mouse needs milk and eventually all sorts of things.

Me, I keep looking at this blog, which is supposed to be a secret blog for fun and asking what else it could be. What it could become.

If you give me a blog, I’ll want a newsletter, and if you give me a newsletter, I’ll want a growth strategy, and if you give me a larger audience I’ll want a high-ticket offer, and if you give me that, I’ll want a three-day work week, and so forth.

(I’m embarrassed just typing this.)

And the idea that we’ve all been sucked into monetizing our hobbies has certainly been covered already. I meant to read One Day I’ll Work for Myself, which further explores some cultural factors around this, but didn’t choose to have the energy for it.

This evening, I already tooled around in CSS in case I want custom formatting for the newsletter I don’t have and am not sure I want to have right now, then made notes about potential sections for this newsletter. I decided I no longer liked the header I made for this newsletter, which I never used, and thought about what I’d do for embedded images if I decide to link back to this blog.

Is this “all in good fun”? Is it okay to just think about building something and not actually do it, because the thinking is more fun? Where is the line between “I don’t actually want to do this, but I find thinking about it more fun than watching TV” and “I’m stuck/spinning my wheels/not living my true dreams!”

I think this situation is the former, but although lots of people make various kinds of creative work that they don’t share, I haven’t exactly read too many creative odes to the visual design of unsent email newsletters.

(Speaking of which, remember MySpace? And all the creative effort some people put into designing their pages. For fun. I loved this recent Tedium article about it.)

Last week, I caught myself trying to optimize my way out of a childcare problem. I thought if I only got my various organizational tools perfectly aligned, I’d be able to get by on less childcare than I really need. Surprise—that didn’t work. But while misdiagnosing the problem was stressful and frustrating, there was something fun about the misdiagnosis. It gave me a chance to play around with how I structure Obsidian, and I ended up choosing a different email client that I think is going to be good for me.

Making structures is my creative practice.

I think that’s why things feel jumbled. Because aren’t we supposed to make structures to support our creative practice? Designing and setting up new structures for myself—new tools, new newsletter templates, and the like—makes me feel creatively joyful.

How can I reconcile this with the idea that structures are only worthwhile in the context of a creative practice that creates work to go in those structures?

(Is this an idea that I even agree with?)

Is there a way to acknowledge that my creative energy lies in making structures, and yet choose to make ones that feel a little more “complete”? Like making a workbook, or a spreadsheet template?

(I’m actually very interested in spreadsheets as creative practice, but that’s a topic for another day.)

I need to explore this jumble a bit more.

I really thought that the “real work” was the creative work to go in the structures.

But if I let the creation of structures that I don’t “use” be the work itself, what does that open up?