A few months ago I came across a question that stuck with me: If someone else took over your life, what’s the first thing they would change?
The best reflection questions have obvious answers, and in my case what popped into my head was my newsletter. This month marks the two year anniversary of my weekly emails, and despite mostly sticking to that cadence it’s no longer working for me. Between summer plans, more days in the office and marathon training, I don’t have enough time to put towards writing each week, which leaves me stressed and scrambling to pull something together come Wednesday night. It’s not sustainable.
The trouble with unsustainable things is that they don’t always crash and burn all at once. And for much of this year, squeezing my newsletter in between other obligations has worked – I’ve written pieces I felt good about and have gotten encouraging feedback from all of you, despite a very messy process on the backend. Only now, after a couple weeks of struggle, can I honestly look back and see that this process really hasn’t worked for a while now.
Throughout this period, I’ve been ignoring my challenge network – the people Adam Grant says we “trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses.” When it comes to my writing, that network is one person: Anne. Only she sees how inconsistent my writing sessions are, and how my mood fluctuates with my newsletter progress each week. Only she gives me the feedback I don’t want to hear:
Less is more.
On Tuesday, after a particularly unproductive writing session, I finally told her that something needed to change, and she let me know exactly what that change looked like from the outside: Move to a monthly email. She helped me see that I could spend more time developing and workshopping ideas, and less time agonizing over the short turnaround. More importantly, she helped me disprove all the false narratives I’d told myself about why a monthly cadence would never work:
Me: “I’ll stop writing entirely.”
Anne: “You’ve kept it up for two years now and shared it with everyone in your life, doesn’t seem likely.”
Me: “I’m just in a temporary rut.”
Anne: “Are you? It’s been this way for a long time now.”
Me: “I’ll end up with more stress at the end of the month.”
Anne: “Not if you plan ahead – and if that’s the case maybe this whole thing isn’t sustainable.”
Me: “People expect weekly emails.”
Anne: “What’s more important? Weekly emails or emails you feel proud of?”
What I love about this newsletter is the dialogue it creates with all of you readers, and my biggest fear is losing my platform if I slow things down. No matter how small my audience is, it’s an audience – and before starting this project in May 2020, the idea that I would be writing for any audience would have felt outlandish. What I’ve built feels fragile, and easily lost. As Morgan Housel put it when he left The Motley Fool for his own website:
“I had built up an audience there and I had no idea if any of them would travel with me. And if I went somewhere else, did I have to start at square one and build myself up from zero? That was terrifying.”
But unsustainable is unsustainable, and if weekly emails aren’t working, I’m better off making a change now than waiting for the crash and burn later.
So I’m moving to a monthly schedule. As a leader at my company once said, “there is a season for everything,” and this is not the season of my newsletter. It’s the season of summer vacation, reconnecting with coworkers in the office, and working towards a 3-hour marathon in the fall. Writing will come, but on different terms. I’m okay with that.
And if a part of you thinks all of this sounds familiar, ask yourself: If someone took over my life, what’s the first thing they would change?
What are you doing that’s unsustainable?
– Emmett