Corralling All the Ponies

I taught a class on Wednesday and worked two mornings at the Gift Festival and now I am thoroughly peopled out. I do have a baby shower to attend today, but I think it will be a low-key event. Next week is unscheduled except for sewing. I am going to do my best to keep it that way, and you can bet I am looking forward to a road trip and the opportunity to spend 10 hours enjoying the peace and quiet inside my own head.

I listened to Nicole Sauce’s livestream Wednesday evening. Her guest was Sue Zoldak, who has been on the podcast before and who is a wealth of great information. Sue owns three companies, one of which is an ad agency. The focus of the Wednesday episode was branding. I will admit to copying Nicole’s branding strategy. She is the “face” of three very different brands—Holler Roast Coffee, Self-Reliance Festival, and the Living Free in Tennessee podcast—and had to come up with some way to manage them coherently. Sue Zoldak suggested she put them all under the umbrella of NicoleSauce.com, a domain Nicole already owned. When I started the podcast, I chose to do something similar and brought everything under JanetSzabo.com.

That has worked nicely, but now I need to corral and organize the various social media platforms. I listened to a panel discussion from the fall workshop hosted by Jack Spirko (The Survival Podcast), and one of the questions that came up was on how to participate in and manage social media. A person could spend 12 hours a day doing nothing but engaging on social media. (That sounds like hell, honestly.) The advice from the panel was to focus on one or two platforms and automate as much of the rest of it as possible. I opened a Metricool account and am hoping that it will help me with that task.

Some days I feel like my life consists of scaling one learning curve after another.

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I ordered this book yesterday—it was released on Tuesday and I am very excited to look it over:

I have Johanna’s book on coverstitch techniques and it is worth its weight in gold. I expect this one to be a keeper, too. Her YouTube channel is an excellent resource.

I still have fabric that needs to be turned into clothing, but I would like to find some balance between clothing production and quilting because I enjoy both.

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Another of Sue Zoldak’s comments on the livestream that really resonated with me was that she also gets asked—constantly—how she manages to get everything done and to be so productive. Her answer was fabulous. She said that she demands distillation; people who would like some of her time have to have distilled their requests down to the essentials. She does not tolerate meetings consisting of endless discussions.

This is something that frustrates me to no end. I cannot stand meetings that are social events or meetings that detour down rabbit trails on unrelated topics. (Or podcasts ostensibly focused on sewing that veer off into discussions about cats or toddlers.) My time is valuable. The word NO worked well as the word of the year for 2023; now I need to find one for 2024.