One of the things I've learned in recent years, is that sometimes, we have to throw rationality out the window and do the things that don't make sense, not just that don’t scale, but that aren’t even sustainable. Though I can honestly say that there are still plenty of things I have someone sustained much longer than seemed reasonable, but hey we can’t go too far down that road.

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This brings us to today, well not specifically, but more generally. When I feel my most alive, I am navigating challenges (with a few wins) and feeling in the driver's seat of my destiny, path, future, or whatever you want to call it. And a lot of that power, or stability, for me, comes from creating. Not large beautiful oil paintings, but millions of pixels on a screen working together. 

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A lot of the projects I’m working on right now are in the 0 to 1 stage, or more accurately the -1 to 0 stage, and benefit from deep work sessions to brainstorm, than build the first widget and the subsequent workflows to support it. 

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Anyway, back to the unsustainability at hand. As a solo mom of two kids and as someone who works a fairly demanding ‘day job’, plentiful deep work sessions do not abound. A lot of my non-mom/work time is focused on supporting the structure for those roles: meal prepping, groceries, activity planning, my own health, laundry, sleeping 7+ hours a night, you know the deal. I’m not exactly turning off the world's demands to dive deep and focus on my projects beyond an hour or two here and there. See also slowly soul-killing. This is why I’ll happily exchange sleep and body rest for flashes where I can light my soul up and recharge creative energy, and keep that light burning a little longer. 

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Enter this weekend, I am on a personal creative retreat – from the comfort of my home, reinforced with sticky notes, tri-folds, and my constantly running AC. I’m excited for to use focused sprint to tackle a few Margo projects that will bring the platform forward and ready for its re-release back into the wild. My kids are with their grandparents, and I’ve stocked up on easy-to-eat snacks (and a few Celsius), and catering will be provided by UberEats. I’m drawing the blinds and nerding out for two and a half days, diving into features, user workflows, onboarding communications, and ultimately a reemerging Monday with a new Marketer platform within Margo that will help freelance marketers scale their businesses and work with growing brands more easily. 

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The nice thing about a focused sprint is that it helps me make enough progress quickly that I can tap into that feeling of momentum to maintain the project as an integrated part of my (busy) lifestyle when we get back to normal day-to-day. Thinking about the maintenance of the thing, also helps to prioritize the parts that need to happen now, vs can be articulated and defined later. The power of the parking lot. (Feels like I should be using this more as a tool in daily life.)

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Pus, I know that rest and recovery are coming around the bend as I have to return to the doctor for my next round of medication early next week, which will trigger a couple days of forced rest. 

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**My heart attack was triggered by hyperactive eosinophils that decided to take out my heart once they tackled COVID.

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