Happy Friday 🌞

We’re in the final few days of the year and this is the year I’ve written and published the most of any previous year. This will be my 20th newsletter this year (just sneaking in to hit my goal right before the deadline), and I was very close to publishing 20 articles as well. Both goals felt like a stretch when I set them last December and I’m pretty pleased to be here and seeing the results.

All that to say, I shared a lot this year, so I wanted to take a moment to collect a few of the top things I’ve shared this year, either because they’ve been the most impactful for me or because they were shared the most by others.

Here goes:

Best systems

I doubled down on using the right systems to reach my goals this year and it worked out for me.

1. The number one system I cannot recommend enough is having a daily journal in Notion. Here’s exactly how mine is set up. This has been super powerful for me in staying on track this year, and as I wrote about earlier in the year, switching to more frequent check-ins has actually been easier than checking in monthly or quarterly.
2. Related, weekly reviews and reflections have helped me stay focused. The daily journal is really used by me each day to set intentions, look at goals, and reflect on that day. I then spend Sundays reflecting on the previous week and planning for the week ahead. This often takes me less than 30 minutes and I leave the exercise feeling so much more focused on what matters for the week ahead.
3. I now have a simple bookmarks database I reference all the time. This was so easy to set up for myself and now I have a much easier time recalling the articles I was looking for and keeping track of resources I wanted to use for different elements of my work or writing.
4. Finally, identity-based goals have kept me going. I made a change to how I set goals this year to set “identity-based goals,” which is a concept I borrowed from James Clear’s identity-based habits. For example, I set a goal to “become a planner” this year and have felt that really went well. It was easier to remember than “be on top of everyone’s birthdays and make sure you are reflecting weekly and do your daily journal.” I decided I was a planner, and so I was one. I talk about identity-based goals in this article on how I set goals.

Best articles

As I mentioned, I did a lot of writing this past year. Here are some of my favorite pieces and the pieces that were shared the most.

1. ​The Content Writer Role at Buffer: What We Looked For In Applications. This one won’t be surprising to anyone who followed along with that hiring process — we had about 1,500 applicants for a role I was hiring for and this article shares a bit more about what we looked for in applications. It was easily my most far-reaching and shared article this year. I just saw it on LinkedIn a few weeks ago and I’m so glad it’s been useful to people who are both hiring and applying.
2. ​How Buffer’s Content Team Collaborates + Our Content Calendar Template. I had wanted to write this one for awhile. I rebuilt out content team from scratch about two years ago and it was fun to share behind the scenes on how I set up our collaboration and content calendar, with a template, which are the best.
3. ​Utilizing A Virtual Assistant For Work And Personal Life. This article started as several emails and messages I was sending to connections who had heard I use a VA. It’s a topic I haven’t talked about too much since writing this article, but it has been shared a lot and I’m so glad my experience with VAs can be useful to people.

Best books

I wrote about the top 10 books I read in 2023, but I wanted to narrow it down even further. If you pick up only a few of the books I wrote about, I’d recommend:

1. ​Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More by Elizabeth Emens. I still think about this book regularly, and I’m sure I’ll reread it in the future. Life Admin helped me think more critically about how I treat admin, how I create the space to complete admin, what counts as admin or work, and invisible admin. If this sounds interesting at all to you, it’s probably a good one for you to read. Habbi and I also discussed this book and what we took from it in-depth in MWW45.
2. ​Digital Zettlekasten by David Kadavee. If you do any writing, pick up this book. This is a very quick read (79 pages) about how to set up the Zettlekasten method digitally. Zettlekasten, which was a new term for me, is a way of organizing your thoughts and ideas into concrete notes that you can easily turn into longer pieces of writing. The practice was used in a letterbox by a 16th-century German sociologist to write 70 books and hundreds of articles. There is lots more to come from me next year on how I’ve set up my Zettlekasten, as it has been in the works for a while now.
3. ​How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey. This was a pretty busy year for me for many reasons — I talked in MWW47 about how my summer was filled with hiring, and more recently I shared that my husband and I are expecting our second baby early next year. All that to say, a book about calm was appealing to me and I enjoy a lot of this author’s other writing. Overall, I left with a lot of different tools for achieving a more calm state of mind, so it was well worth the read. The trick now will be continuing to incorporate some of these new practices and build them into habits.

That’s all I have this time. I’m looking forward to keeping this newsletter up in 2024 — let me know if there’s anything specific you want me to write about or share more of.

I hope you have a lovely last few days of 2023. As always, feel free to reply if this sparks any thoughts or questions.

See you in the New Year,

Hailley

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