No Black Friday Deals in this post

Welcome to your monthly occasional dose of insights!

It’s been a minute…

Where the heck you been, Chris?!

I’ve been busy! Keeping up an email newsletter (even a monthly one) turned out to be one thing too many. I’m going to try and make more time for it (and writing more blog posts) in the future.

For now, Americans have Thanksgiving to think about, and the rest of the world has some version of Black Friday. I’m still in Birmingham, England, a country where the stores started selling Christmas stuff in September and quite a few have ‘Black Friday’ in their windows (even if the deals don’t seem all that special).

Guess if the shops can’t or don’t want to lower prices, they make the ‘sale’ longer.

Anyway, back to my reason for mentioning this in the first place.

As November comes to an end, we are 11/12 of the way through the year, or 91.66% if you like percentages.

If you’re in the middle of writing a book in a November book-writing challenge, supporting Movember, or anything you’ve set a goal to do by the end of the year, you have a short time to go.

It’s worth noting, of course, that these sort of deadlines are arbitrary and culturally reinforced (just like Black Friday)… but they give people a structure to play off of.

I don’t mind the ‘end of the year’ / ‘beginning of the year’ resolutions, but I don’t need to wait for them to accomplish something.

Yesterday I found an amazing shelf at a charity shop to hold all of my published games in my living room:

I also went through our bedroom to find clothes and other stuff I wasn’t using any more. The world might call it ‘spring cleaning’, but it was getting crowded up there - I’m not going to wait until spring to do something I knew I needed to do now.

It ended up being about 6 grocery bags worth of stuff, and man it felt good to see some of that empty space reclaimed and a lot of things more organized than before.

What needs doing?

That’s the question I’d be asking myself. By all means, feel free to look back on the goals you made at the start of the year, or whatever’s on your to-do list. Give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve already accomplished the stuff on your to-do list. Don’t give yourself any grief if things weren’t accomplished. As the year goes, you’ve still got a month to do what you can, if you want.

We’ll look ahead to 2025 in my next email (which I’ve already started and will send before the end of 2024).

Thanks for reading - if you’ve got a cool thing still on your to-do list, I’d love to hear about it. Hit ‘reply’ to share =)

Cheers - Chris