First off:

There’s 5 new Fidget Ballpoint pens and 5 new Fidget Mini Ballpoints in the shop. The weekly update is on Patreon, including the latest new materials coming to the shop soon.

The first shop Relic is underway, and so is the first Lotus Fishie for the shop. They’re both intensely difficult designs to make to my own quality standards and even when I get one that passes my own quality control metrics, I always find myself wishing I had more time. I know I’d never release anything if I took as much time as I wanted. (Again, the ongoing practice with releasing perfection.) There’s also Bebes, Retrogrades, and more Fidgets in the works.

If it seems like I’m getting a lot more done lately, it’s because I am. I spent a good chunk of June and July re-working systems – both physical ones, what with having to redo the workshop, and administrative ones, by gutting and rebuilding my project management systems. The net result is that I am getting things done faster – but not because I’m working all that much harder.

(Which… okay, my default is 12 hours a day, but I enjoy it. Leave happy gremlins be and all that.)

The thing that made the difference, that flipped the switch, is that I built systems that fit me. I long ago stopped try to adapt myself to a system or method, and build systems that fit how I know I work. I might test new methods and take pieces that work from them and integrate them into my own little gremlin ecosystem, but everything has to fit together and work well for me to stay. I learned the very hard way that it is much easier to change a system than it is to change myself.

There are times I do need to change or grow, don’t get me wrong. There are times I need to kick myself in the pants and flex the discipline muscles a bit – feelings of guilt, shame, and disappointment are usually my first indicators that there’s something there I want to change. It’s often not what I initially assume it is, either. Am I feeling guilty I didn’t get enough done, or that I didn’t do enough of what mattered to me? Am I feeling ashamed I’m behind, or that I don’t have a good sense of what my priorities are? Am I feeling resentful and guilty for sneaking away to check out because I’m feeling pressured to work under-resourced and worn out without adequate reward for the work?

Feelings are just the barometer, thermometer, Geiger counter, and radar for our own inner weather systems. They are indicators to be used to help us find places or systems that need our attention – and sometimes need change. It takes trial and error to figure out what means what, but if we pay attention and give the weather systems space to show us how they work, we can become highly specialized meteorologists of our own weather systems and we learn how to prevent our own hurricanes from destroying the lives we’ve built. We can’t always avoid the hurricane (says the Floridian) but we can mitigate some of the damage.

I have not spent decades learning how my inner weather systems work to not, well, work with that. That includes building systems that work with my own inner weather patterns. You don’t build a dam on a river that floods every year, and you really shouldn’t build condos on a beach that gets hit every year by hurricanes, unless you’re prepared to rebuild every year.

Do we? Sure, but we can change that for ourselves once we know better, regardless of what everyone else says or does.

-A. Markov