I’m trying to get my shit together again.

If you’re a regular listener of the podcast or reader of this newsletter, you might suspect that my shit is not together. Or maybe more than suspect. You might also be a bit surprised to hear me say my shit isn’t together. My publishing and producing have been a bit erratic this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong.

Most likely, you have not stopped to consider whether my shit is together or not, because you do not think of me until my podcast or newsletter magically appears in whatever app or inbox you happen to be paying attention to.

Good. That’s healthy. For both of us.

To begin, a little backstory…

At the start of 2020–yes, that 2020–I had my shit together. Well, you know what happened next. At first, I was fine, if a bit rattled. But my life and work started to fray around the edges as the year progressed. I started 2021 feeling out of sorts. My shit was still together, but keeping it that way was getting more difficult by the week.

I was hurtling toward a breakdown. By June, that breakdown was in full swing. In August, I spent as much time on my paddleboard in the middle of a lake in western Montana as possible. I was alternating between the kind of sweet dissociation that only paddleboarding can provide and thinking about how it would be better for everyone if I just wasn’t around anymore.

In September, my therapist sent me to my doctor to adjust my meds. And by October, some really hard decisions were made. Oh, and I finished a book proposal and got a modest book deal.

By January 2022, I had walked away from the core of the business I’d been building for over 10 years. I immersed myself in writing the book, and it was published in October 2022 to very positive reviews from people I respect and extremely tepid sales.

The book was essentially, perhaps ironically, about getting your shit together when it came to over-functioning, overachieving, and being overly critical of yourself in the context of goal-setting.

But by the time my book was published, objectively, I no longer had my shit together.

To be clear, I gave myself a lot of grace during this time. I wasn’t overly concerned about not having my shit together. I figured I would get back to it soon.

Well, here we are at the tail end of 2025. And I’m finally ready to figure out what getting my shit together in the shadow of everything I’ve learned about myself and my needs in the last five years is going to look like.

It’s tempting to assume that getting one’s shit together is a forward-looking pursuit. “Here are all the things I’m going to do.” But, in my opinion, an important part of getting one’s shit together is taking stock of said shit. And so this episode is a step in that direction. I enlisted my husband, Sean, to do a bit of a year-end review.

What follows is in no way comprehensive. It’s a wee bit stilted. And if it sounds a little forced, it is—because getting your shit together takes doing some things that you’re out of practice with.

This is simply an exercise in remembering. It’s that first awkward practice that you just have to get through at the beginning of a new season.

Getting my shit together is very much a work in progress, not a grand announcement of some new project or direction for my work. Maybe that will come. Maybe it won’t. My main objective is to feel like I’m steering the ship again.

Below, you’ll find an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation. Or, give the podcast episode a listen!

Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.

What was unexpectedly fun or easy for you this year?

Tara: Let’s start with the second question on my list: what felt unexpectedly fun or easy for you this year?

Sean: In all honesty, I feel a bit stymied to answer this question because nothing this year felt fun or easy. Well, a lot of things felt fun, but nothing really felt easy. So nothing was the pairing of those two things.

Tara: Well, that's okay. There's an ‘or’ in that question.

Sean: It does say ‘or,’ doesn't it?

This is a hard question because a lot has happened this year that I didn't predict to happen. Like going and working at the bookstore was unexpectedly fun in that working at the bookstore was unexpected, but I knew that I was going to enjoy working at the bookstore.

Tara: Do you want to elaborate on working at the bookstore?

Sean: I needed to work outside of the house—or find community and people and interactions outside of the house.

And one of the best ways to do that is get a job outside of the house. So, I saw that our local indie bookstore, just five minute walk from the house, was hiring. So I was like, “Bamo!”

I've been working three days a week there, like four-hour shifts, and it's been really good. It's been really, really good just being out and about and around people.

So that was unexpected. It was expectedly fun once I was [00:10:00] there, but unexpected in the sense that that was not my plan going into the year.

Tara: You know, I didn't give a whole lot of thought to my answers to these questions before we got started because I was going for spontaneity. But I think something that had been really challenging that got a lot easier if still requiring a lot of skill this year, was making my videobooks for our client, Waxwing Books. We do their audiobooks and videobooks. They're a small, indie publisher that primarily publishes picture books.

And, I've gotten to turn these beautiful picture books into fun little moving videobooks. I got started at the end of 2023, and when I first started doing it, I had this idea of making it very simple and just kind of adding a little thing here or there—panning over an illustration, adding in some animated fireflies, etc.

But once I got started with it, it took on a life of its own, and I got way further down into some sort of pseudo-animation rabbit hole that I expected.

Then over the course of 2024, I worked some things out and came up with systems that allowed me to create a better final product. And then this year, I really dialed in my approach to how break down each image, animate parts of it, and then put it back together again.

It's a fun project in and of itself, but also the skill development of it is very fun for me. I’ve described it as the ideal project for my autistic brain because it requires hyper-focus and hyper-attention to detail—there's no way I start working on one of these and don't immediately falling into a flow state.

It's easy in that it's easy to love it, it's easy to get into it, but it's extremely challenging in the best, most fun possible way.

What did you create this year?

Tara: At first you said you didn't have an answer to this question, but then you remembered that you had a very big answer to this question. So, Sean, what did you create this year?

Sean: [00:15:00] It's been a rough year, and one of the things that sort of gets lost in that is my creativity. So when I was thinking back, I was like, well, I didn't do anything this year. But that's not even remotely true.

Last January I did a two-month pottery class at a local studio. And some of the students got pretty close and decided that we would continue in with a membership. Now, there's a core group of four who go every Thursday evening, and everyone brings snacks, and it’s grown as other people at the studio have identified what we’re up to. It's sort of like this little club that formed.

So, I hadn't thought about it in that way but what I've created is what you'd call a community of friends, a community of other artists. And then additionally, I've learned how to make pottery, which has a pretty steep learning curve! It's brutal.

Tara: Outside of client work, I was really happy with the way this year's Summer Seminar came together.

It’s been fun figuring out how to mesh fiction with more practical teaching and thinking about how the stories that I love and the worlds that I love make such great examples of many things that I find really useful or that I really value.

If you had told the 18-year-old me, or even 22-year-old me that I'd be voluntarily engaging with literature and literary analysis, I would've laughed in your face. I was so not interested in fiction in that way. I loved fiction, but I never felt successful in a literature class.

So now, putting a lot of creative energy into literature and literary analysis feels, well, that actually feels a little unexpected.

What habits or systems supported your well-being?

Tara: What habits or systems supported your well-being this year?

Sean: I leaned into some things that I've done for a lot of years. I really leaned into just reminders on my phone. You know, if I want to be able to take all of a Sunday off, well, that means I need to do things out ahead of time, and I need to prepare for those things. [00:20:00] Similar to trying to “get your shit together,” if I want to get myself out of the mire, I have to be pretty intentional. If I want to clean the bathroom every week, I have to remind myself to do it. I can't just wait until I happen to have the time.

Also, I'm using systems as a way of actually getting things done as opposed to “systems for systems' sake.” I have systems to actually get the things I need to get done, which means that a lot of the geekery that I've done in the past to build systems, while wonderful and I enjoyed it, has sort of fallen to the wayside. I really stripped it down to “This is what actually works.” This is the system that I need and use, and I don't really need anything beyond this. I don't need to make this more complex than it needs to be.

Tara: Can you give us an example?

Sean: Note-taking is one. There are all sorts of systems and software products for maximizing your note-taking. But I just don't do that. What I'm doing now is taking notes on the most accessible places that I have. And then if I need them again, I need them, but I'm not turning it into a fancy process. Most of the things that I'm taking notes on are really about getting myself to engage and remember. I don't need to get as elaborate as I had been in the past. So just Google Notes on my phone, or I have a Field Notes journal in my pocket all the time.

Tara: What are the kinds of things that you're taking notes on?

Sean: I'm exploring the idea of doing some writing again, and so stuff that strikes me in that sense. Also things that I want to look further into this idea, this author, or this concept, but I don't want to disrupt what I'm doing now.

It’s kind of the idea of a commonplace notebook, where something has happened to really pique my interest and I take a note. It is a way of pausing with something that was intriguing to me and giving it more attention in that moment.

Tara: I'm curious whether your “just do what works” kind of system is reflected in your work as well?

Sean: Yeah, for sure. At the end of last year, I was exploring different ideas as far as what I would do for work. But when I ended up coming back to YellowHouse.Media with relief, being like, “Wait a second, this is actually pretty great working for myself. Doing podcast production's pretty great. Let's get back into this with joie de vivre.” And I realized that all of the systems and structures that I'd put into place work very well.

So I leaned into what I've already made as opposed to going and doing something different.

Tara: Sean, what habits and systems supported my wellbeing this year?

Sean: I think you're really good at identifying what you need, but I don't know that you really did a whole lot of like… it's been a rough year.

Tara: It has been a rough year. One of my personal policies for this year has been, “It's better to eat something than nothing.” I think I kind of landed on that last year or the year before that even. [00:25:00] But still, I've had way less guilt about “eating something is better than nothing” this year than I have previously, even if I’ve been saying it.

I think to kind of flip the question on its head to, to get back to where I started with, I've decided to get my shit back together. Part of that is recognizing that I really like having a plan. I like knowing what I'm going to be working on ahead of time. I like to have those dates in the calendar or themes for the quarter or whatever it might be that provides some guidance and direction.

You know, it was the end of 2022 when we recorded something similar—which was just a couple of months after my book came out. And the book was very systems-oriented. It was very project-based.

And, the truth is that in the production of that book and also the time in my life that I was producing that book, all of the stuff that I had created over years, practices that had worked so well for me, was kind of too much. Just too much.

I was overwhelmed. I was burnout. And so, this year I realized that I don't want to get overwhelmed or burnt out again. But the work systems I had previously, they weren't the problem. Other things were the problem. Maybe the amount of stuff that those work systems allowed me to accomplish was part of the problem. But that doesn't mean that the work systems were the problem.

So what of all that learning do I want to bring back into my life and work, and how could that help me do some things differently next year in a positive way?

You mentioned paring things way, way down. One of the things that I've been experimenting with as I attempt to get my shit back together is using widgets on my computer desktop that are just my lists of reminders. So not project management software, nothing complicated. But just little reminders of what I want my priorities to be. That’s working really well.

And finally, this is pretty new still, but back in October I told you that I thought the reason I'm not producing as much writing is because I can't write on my iPad anymore. My iPad was a first generation iPad Pro, and I’d managed to trash two keyboards with “normal” use. And it seemed silly to buy another keyboard for such an old device. So I was just making do.

But when I realized that not having that easy device to pick up and start writing with was interfering with my work, you conconvinced me to get a new iPad. And it’s allowed me to get back into an old habit which is that, after coffee, breakfast, and book time in the morning, I spend 5-30 minutes writing. [00:30:00]

Maybe I'm working on a piece that I plan to publish. Maybe I am doing some writing on a project that's further out. Maybe it's just a thing that I read about this morning that I want to kind of process through in my brain. But just getting back in the habit of putting words on paper again every morning has been a really positive change for the last couple of months.

Sean: Did the realization that you needed to get your shit together have any sort of connection to bringing back that writing practice?

Tara: That's a really good question. I would say that there is a connection in that I'm in this process of asking myself what's working and what's not working. And, importantly, what worked in the past that I've stopped doing that I could probably afford to do again. That inquiry process is common between those two things.

But I don't think that one is directly related to the other.

Tara: One of the other things that was really different this year is that I did some business coaching again this year. And I hadn’t done that in any kind of concentrated form in quite a while. That was a reminder that I know how to do things. I can do things in a way that isn't in violation of my values or my worldview or things like that.

I'm pretty good at some of this stuff and maybe I forgot that, and maybe this would be a good time to remember that.

Sean: That might be one of the themes of this year for both of us: returning to and remembering what our skillset already is, what we're already good at. It doesn't seem like it's been a big year of building big things or changing things. It seems like it's been getting back to what we know.

Tara: I produced my 500th podcast episode in September. Then I had my 10-year anniversary of podcasting in November. And I let both of those things go unannounced for multiple reasons. But in the process, I sort of recognized, “Oh boy, it's probably time to start paying attention again.”

One More Thing

If you, like me, are out of practice with exercises like this one, I hope this conversation is an invitation to do some messy, awkward reflection of your own. Reviewing your year and planning for next year, or simply trying to get your shit together again after a while, isn’t something you have to do perfectly for it to count or for it to be valuable to you.

And if you’re looking for a guide? Try my book.