An Ambitious Retreat and Regrouping

Hello, I thought I would just give you probably a bit of a rambling update about what we've been doing. It's been quite busy. Life is generally very busy. We just have far too many plates to spin and we always seem to be on the go. But I've actually got three days at home on my own because Chris is visiting another men's shed and he should be there right now. What time is it now? 20 to 12 as I'm recording this, so he should be there now. He's speaking to the shed in his capacity as patron of UK men's sheds and they were very excited about him going. So there was mention of Press, the local MP, so who knows what's happening. I'm sure that I'll find out later.

But anyway, it's given me a few days at home. So as I do, I've got a long, long, long list of things to do. I probably won't get through all of them; I'm probably going to have to compromise on some of the stuff. But I planned to have a spring clean in the house because it's a lot easier when it's just me, because I tend to work on a few different rooms at a time. I'm having a bit of a declutter, so I've got a box for charity stuff. I'm having a bit of a clear out of things that we don't need and doing all those little jobs like cleaning skirting boards and wiping down doors and all that sort of stuff. I don't really do windows. I'm not the best at doing windows or mirrors, so that's a job that Chris will do. He's much better at it than me.

So that's one of my things on my to-do list. And I'm just having a bit of a catch-up. Sometimes I think when you're busy you never really feel like you're catching up because you're going from one thing to another and you don't have time to slow down. I like to start my day when I'm back from the farm and I've done all the farm stuff by using Twos, and I have a few templates that I add to my today page. So I have a daily log, I have kind of a morning routine, and a lot of the questions come from Dickie Bush. I've kind of taken all his stuff and created templates, and it just gets my head in the game really.

I think I might have mentioned this before, and it just kind of lets me just chill out for a bit, get things out of my head, think about what I want to do each day, think about writing, and yeah, I don't know, it's just something that when I do it, it just makes the day go better and it's quite therapeutic. So I use a few different tools. So although Twos is my repository for all the stuff that I write down, I will come into voice notes and I will do kind of a brain dump and a bit of a download, and then I just copy the text and put the link in to that particular voice note in Twos.

So yeah, I just copy the text and put the link in to that particular voice note in Twos. So yeah, I'm just using different things, but eventually they all end up back in Twos. So the brain dump really helps. It just lets me articulate what I'm thinking about, things that I might need to do. I also use another app that I really love called Light Page, and this is described as a living journal. So I kind of run a bit of a to-do list in there. So I'll dump stuff in and Neo, who is my AI guide in Lightpage, I like to give everybody names, he will then collate my list for me and I can say, right, I've done this and I've done that.

I do have a to-do list in Twos as well, and I just find having somebody or something to collaborate with and to get nudges on what I need to do has really helped me be productive. I find Lightpage really good as a sounding board just to be able to talk to people about things that might be going on, if I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything, work out my priorities. I like in Lightpage the daily suggestions that come up, and these are related to things that you've talked about. So it might be, what was I talking about the other day? It might just have been talking about being a bit overwhelmed and having too many plates to spin.

So it will present you in the morning with a couple of posts that are relevant, and they've been really helpful, things that I probably wouldn't have found on my own. Also, there's a picture, so these are paintings, old, going back to 1600s, something like that, some of them, Old Masters. But yeah, just again relating to something I've said or just what I'm trying to do. Like, so for these three days I've called it a bit of a retreat. It's probably not going to end up being that, but having some time to think about writing, where I go from here because I kind of lost the plot a little bit with my writing.

So I do have some stuff on Substack, but I haven't written on Substack, I don't know when I last wrote on there, maybe three or four weeks ago, just because I got busy. So I just want to have a think about what am I doing? How am I going to publish? What am I going to write? I've probably got too many projects on the go. I've got the Essence Map, I've got The Undertaker, which is a short story that I kind of want to expand on, and I've started doing that. I've got The Death Certificate, which is a series of 12 short stories. I've got different elements of the Essence Maps. I've got a book, an e-book, and it's all just too many things on the go at once.

So what I want to do over the next couple of days is kind of plan out how I can do things and space it all out across maybe 12 months so that I get things done. But yeah, I'm just having a rethink about Substack. Substack can be great, but also you can spend a lot of time reading other people's content when you really need to focus on your own. So yeah, that's something that I'm contemplating over the next couple of days.

I've also been buying stationery. I had a little bit of money that came that was unexpected, so I decided to just ring fence that for a bit of stationary purchasing. So a few things are coming today. I bought myself a traveller's notebook; it's not the official traveller's notebook, I think this is a new Esther one. So if you can hear Jingle Dangle, that's my little charm on the front of the notebook. It's one I had a while back, but I do like Midori's and I had some made by a guy in Lancashire. So I got a few different notebooks in here, some stickers, and all sorts of different stuff. So I've got a couple of things coming that I've ordered as well.

I've had far too many notebooks, or is it really true that you can never have too many notebooks? I don't know, I just like stationery. So some of the stuff is arriving today, and I've just ordered a couple of things for tomorrow as well. So yeah, these next few days are really about regrouping a bit, organizing the house, having a bit of a clear out, thinking about writing, trying to get a plan in my head as to how much I can write and what I want to be working on.

So yeah, a bit of a waffly voice note today, but hopefully the next few days will give me a bit more clarity, so I might share some of that with you. Anyway, thanks for listening, and I will be back fairly soon. Bye for now.