The Complexity of Simplifying

Making a map, and then acting imperfectly

Welcome to Body of Work! Traditionally BoW is a bi-weekly newsletter, but this summer I’m publishing on a weekly basis (you can read more about the reason for that here). You are highly encouraged to read them at whatever pace feels good for you!

---

I’ve been trying to jigsaw puzzle my way into an understanding of my existing projects, my ideas for future projects, and how everything fits together. I felt, somewhat inexplicably, that there was a banner that could bring everything together if I could just figure it out. I’ve written previously about balancing my many ideas and the focus and energy I have to pour into them, and I think on some level I recognized that an energy leak was happening as a result of my not being clear on my container(s). 

I started the puzzling the way I usually do, which is throwing myself at the problem in my own mind and then feeling frustrated that while I might generate new ideas that way, it doesn’t help me to unravel tangled thoughts. I started thinking about ecosystems and the ways that many different things live together and flourish. As a kid, I played SimSafari a lot and I remember this food web that showed the complex interaction of how all the different creatures in the safari park related to each other;¹ I wanted to understand the web of my creations and how they feed each other.  

Thinking about it incessantly wasn’t moving me forward, so I decided to create a map of my "business ecosystem." I didn’t have a template for what this should look like, but I knew what I was trying to understand was the points of overlap and divergence, and secondarily how much diversity I had in format and size of offering. It also felt important to physically write things down, to limit my getting caught up in formatting or arranging information. 

On a 12x18” paper I wrote down my offerings and projects with the key information about them². 

For nine different subjects, I wrote the following:

• Type of offer/project (e.g. newsletter, physical product, live group)

• Any relevant subcategorization

• One sentence summary (the elevator pitch)

• Themes of the offer/project

For example, here’s what Body of Work says: 

Body of Work

• Newsletter

• Personal storytelling, essay

• Personal reflections at the intersection of work & self-making

• Themes: Productivity, self-image, creativity

One of the things it made very apparent for me is that I have a lot of areas of thematic overlap, but  everything lives within its own silo (which ultimately creates more work for me).

For instance, I have another newsletter called GOOD PLAN, about planning and productivity. I started it in support of Open Concept Agenda³, because it made sense for a planner company to have a newsletter about getting things done. It is less personal in orientation than the newsletter you’re reading now, but ultimately both of them are about finding human-centered ways to get things done and feel good about how we spend our time. It wouldn't serve either offering for me to just mash these two newsletters together, but in the long run having two similar but slightly different newsletters also feels like a bad strategy. 

This is the kind of thing I can get really hung up on—wanting to find a perfect solution before doing anything. I feel deeply resistant to the idea of investing too much time and energy into something I am anticipating will change or go away entirely. And yet, with GOOD PLAN, I’m also hesitant to abandon it completely if I haven’t found another way to meet the needs that I created it to meet. It’s a double bind. 

The thing is, I know that no one else is thinking about my work as much as I am. It is very possible (probable, even) that none of the people subscribed to GOOD PLAN would even notice if I just stopped emailing them. But I don’t feel good about that plan. And I also know that if I want people to participate in the ecosystem I am building, it’s my responsibility to create at least a semblance of coherence. Sending people in 18 different directions is confusing for them, and at the end of the day it’s confusing for me too. 

So what now? 

I am very grateful to have people in my life who will listen to me talk about these things and look at my big pieces of paper and nudge me to take imperfect action rather than staying stuck.⁴

In the case of GOOD PLAN, imperfect action looks like moving that newsletter over to Substack (the same platform I use for Body of Work) so that I’m not managing two different tools. In addition to simplifying tech, it means that I can focus on funneling people to one place, and pretty easily inter promote newsletters.⁵ Maybe later this will feel like a bad use of time! Maybe they could be the same newsletter! Maybe I’m overthinking it! I’ll start working on it and see what happens.⁶

Small steps & realistic plans

Is there something out there that you want to take imperfect action on too? 

1. I really searched for screenshots of this to share with you but either no one else was as captivated as I was or this food web memory actually comes from something else entirely

2. This was a useful exercise! If you too have many things going on (or many ideas), I encourage you to try it.

3. In case you didn’t know, the Open Concept Agenda is a planner that I co-designed and sell and I bet you’d really like them!

4. Shout out to Lexxie, and Liz Bayan, particularly, for recent help on this.

5. Anyone who signs up for one is now going to get a suggestion to sign up for the other through Substacks recommendations. Maybe you want to click here and go check it out now as well?

6. I sold a planner within a couple of hours of sharing about GOOD PLAN post-move, so I feel pretty positive at the moment!