Hello, fellow tinkerer 👋

Happy Wednesday. It's unbearably hot where I live, so we had ice cream for dinner last night. Yep. Sweltering heat + brain tumor diagnosis = officially entered the DNGAF era.

1) Reflection:

My brain surgery is in 27 days, and I've been doing a ton in the background to keep parts of my life moving while I recover.

I've been truly touched by the people who have reached out to offer help and support. Some of these people I've never met in real life. I only know them online. I think it speaks volumes to the connections we can form with people, even through channels like social media or a newsletter.

2) Product

My two older kids (ages 15 and 13) have been doing some work for me this summer. My older kiddo has been learning some SEO basics and making tweaks to my website, while my younger kiddo has been creating some images in Midjourney. I'm paying them for their work, so it's been a great way to let them earn extra money while also keeping them occupied (plus the payment is classified as a business expense).

​Airtable [affiliate link] is my centralized hub for everything related to my published content, so my kids have been using this to track their work. I use the Interfaces feature to create lists for the projects they need to work on. When they're done, they check a box for the record in Airtable.

3) Tip

I plan my newsletters pretty far in advance and this week I'd planned to write about the topic of Swedish Death Cleaning — a cultural tradition of decluttering and organizing your life before passing away. Years ago, Marie Kondo encouraged the world to "tidy up" and get rid of anything that doesn't bring you joy, but Swedish Death Cleaning is different. You clean while thinking to yourself, "If I were dead, how do I want to lessen the burden for my family that has to go through my stuff?"

Of course, I had this topic planned before learning that I have a brain tumor, and that now seems very morbid... (though I'm not going to die from surgery). But I have had to think about, "How can I organize my life when other people (like my parents) have to take over certain parts of it while I recover?"

I'm lucky that I have about seven weeks between diagnosis and surgery, with four remaining. It's made me think hard about how I organize things, how to give people access to different accounts, and how things are organized around the house.

I'll be leaving a GIANT Google Doc with a lot of notes for people who will be helping out during recovery.

Want more ideas?

→ My friend Sarah Duran is hosting a Future Is Freelance forum on July 1 on the topic of "Building Your Reputation As a Freelancer." You can register here.

→ If you want to organize your online content in a product like Airtable, here's a step-by-step guide to creating a Content Library.

→ You can follow my brain tumor journey in my personal blog. You can also support my recovery through GoFundMe.

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That's it for this issue of Tinkering! See you again in two weeks.

Cheers,
Anna

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