Table of Contents

• 🔦 Spotlight

• 🧠 Thinking

• 💼 Bidness

🔦 Spotlight

Notion gang, STAND UP!!!!!

I’m dedicating this spotlight to loyal users of Notion and Google Calendar alike. For those of us who use Notion as our second brain, this past week has been pivotal!

Last week Notion released the Notion Calendar app (an adapted version of Cron Calendar which they acquired in 2022).

The ability to have the Notion app, its Calendar app, and my Google Calendar all speak to each other so fluently is completely changing the game for my productivity and the potential of my Notion app. It’s also changing the game for Notion’s business outlook in 2024.

I’m linking a thread from Notion’s Twitter (I’m never saying X) page and a helpful tutorial from a separate creator to help you explore if this new calendar option is right for you.

🧠 Thinking

On the topic of under challenged burnout…

I have been on a full out sprint since the very first day of the year and I am finally starting to feel it which worries me just a tad.

I spent all of last year incredibly burned out. Like, my friends and family were worried about me levels of burn out. Like, I moved past agony into apathy levels of burn out. And I never ever ever want to get to that level ever again.

But now that I reflect on the experience, the truly interesting thing about it is that I spent a good portion of last year unemployed and “resting” which defies our typical understanding of what causes burnout.

According to WebMD, “Burnout is a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. It’s a result of excessive and prolonged emotional, physical, and mental stress. In many cases, burnout is related to one’s job.”

What many people do not know is that there are 3 forms of burnout.

1. Overload Burnout: too much hard, stressful work

2. Under-Challenged Burnout: boring, meaningless work

3. Neglect Burnout: helplessness often relating to doubting your own skills

Last year I cycled through overload and under-challenged burnout that left my head spinning. I spent some points of the year feeling like I needed to be doing less work I hated and others deeply craving doing more work I loved. But the prescription we offer for all forms of burnout is often the same, REST. But what does that mean? How does one rest when it feels like the very problem is not moving enough?

I will say that it’s wonderful to see conversations about the importance of rest so prevalently in our cultural conversation, like the work of Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry and in her book, Rest is Resistance. Chinelo of Interested in Black Books wrote an interesting book review you can read here.

“Go to your beds. Go to your couches. Find a hammock. Go into the portal of naps. Go there often. You don't have to wait on permission from the dominant culture. Your body is divine and sovereign. Go to your spaces of rest, joy, and freedom. Create them in your imagination. Create them in your communities. Create them in your homes. Create them in your workspaces. Create them in your heart. Daydream collectively. Do all these things with others. We will not heal alone. We will not thrive alone. Communal care is our saving grace and our communion. Community care will save us. It is already saving us.“

I’m personally interested in engaging Tricia’s thinking on this matter more because I’m also open to pushbacks and critiques of her work stating that rest isn’t resistance but resistance is resistance. I have to do more reading to clarify my own stance but appreciate her additions to this broader anti-capitalist conversation.

I’m clear on how much my goals are going to require hard, stressful, laborious work and how good it often does and does not feel to be working toward my goals. The rule of thirds really helped me make sense of my feelings at the various stages of building. And I’m comfortable with that trade-off because I’ve spent a lot of time interrogating these goals, their costs, their implications, etc.

But it is requiring me to think CRITICALLY about how I work and rest. Like really sit down and question my systems, techniques, and methodologies for both. If it took Beyonce 4 years of HARD work to create Renaissance then I have to be okay with it taking me what it’s going to take to reach my own dreams. And therefore resting can’t always look like laying still for multiple days and doing nothing or taking long strings of days off every time I turn in a deliverable.

Rest is the balm that allows the work to continue. Rest is also in service of the work, not a detractor from it, when we allow rest to be part of our overall practice of getting things done. It’s this balancing act that I’m thinking about this week.

I’m putting the following clips into conversation with this broader topic…

💼 Bidness

deep heavy ancestral sigh

Let's attempt to talk about this Tongoro v Balmain moment. Olivier Rousteing of Balmain presented their FW24 menswear show this week. For this collection, Olivier and his collaborators were inspired by “tailored french silhouettes and colorful African patterns.” It may be some of the best work Rousteing has put down the runway…except not all of it seems to be quite his.

Enter Sarah Diouf, the founder of the African brand Tongoro. You know them for this ICONIC Renaissance era look which I saw the queen debut live at her show in Santa Clara.

Sarah took to Instagram to express her frustration with Balmain putting a ctrl + c, ctrl + v replica of her jewelry piece Ciaro down the runway. Tongoro first released this piece in 2019 and it has been replicated many times since then, most notably in this Balmain runway show.

My takeaway - the importance of protecting your ideas as a creative. But also, the importance of storytelling when things don’t go your way. While I FULLY understand the disappointment Sarah is feeling about Olivier directly biting off of her idea, I wish she angled the response a bit differently. Are the PR agents in the home?! I would have loved to see a “Yeah I know I’m that girl and you do too, we see the nod to greatness” angle but I get it. I do. Let’s see how things continue to unfold.

The legal angle to all of this…

Whatever your dream or your goal is, keep at it. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. You’ll thank yourself later.