Last week I celebrated my birthday during such a busy week personally and professionally that I barely took time to acknowledge it happened. In the span of a week, I launched three websites, played in five — wait, actually, six — tennis matches, got everyone to after-school activities mostly on time, and remembered to show up for two different kid parties this weekend.

This ability to mute my life and just tune into the pressing tasks at hand has always been my biggest blessing and biggest curse. (The inability to say no to pretty much any social event is just a curse... ask my husband.)

But, on Sunday, I sat outside with a heavy quilt and a hot coffee under a crisp autumn sky. I took many, many deep breaths until I felt my whole body soften and relax. Then, I wrote down what I wanted most in the next trip around the sun. Here’s what I wrote:

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​I want more presence, even at the cost of productivity.

I want more calm, even at the cost of growth.

I want more communal support, even at the cost of my own ego.

I want deep roots, even at the cost of a wide reach.

A Resource

In the spirit of finding calm, I've been working hard to find a better way to manage my tasks and ensure I don't let things slip through the cracks. I'm playing with Motion to help use AI to build my schedule, and it's been really helpful! It's kind of $$$, but the routine of immediately adding tasks to a list is a gift unto itself, and watching my calendar reshuffle as priorities inevitably change has been pretty cool.

Unrelated, but also super helpful: my bookkeeper recommended Hubdoc as a way to quickly organize receipts. Every time a new invoice comes to my email, I just forward it to a special email address that scans the doc and automatically finds and attaches it to Quickbooks transaction. Easy peasy bookkeeping.

In Our Launch Era 🚀

• We launched a refresh of Toups & Co. last week. They've been a client for several years, and we worked to bring their Shopify store onto a 2.0 theme for improved site speed, accessibility enhancements and lots of mobile improvements. We aligned the launch to their 8th birthday, and it was such a fun celebration.
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• In September, we launched a full redesign for Kaizen Food Company that focused on turning up the yummy factor for this high-protein pasta brand. (also: this pasta is so delicious and my whole family eats it up, multiple times per week)​
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• We also recently launched a redesign for Root 23, a simple syrup brand. My favorite feature is the recipe blog that allows customers to filter through cocktail recipe inspiration that features their favorite Root 23 syrup.