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Happy Full Moon in Leo, Reader!

Today, I want to talk about itty-bitty changes leading to big-time productivity, and then I’m going to tie this in with Jungian Magic and turning romance novels into sigils 💋.

This year, I’ve made some changes to my daily work schedule. Pre-schedule change, I worked from 6:30~7:00 a.m. until either 4:00 (if I had an after-work walk with a friend) or 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.

That’s 10 hours a day on average that I was working, and yet I always felt like I was behind. Talk about bleh. 😖

What did I change?

I’m an early bird, so I still start work @6:30, but now I divide my day into blocks. I work on Twin Flames, my romance series, every morning during block one, and block two is working on orders for my tiny food business, The Mouse Market.

After that, I alternate projects M/W/F and T/Th. One set of days is allocated to whatever medium-length project I’m working on, which could be writing lessons for the Portal or creating a new course. The other days are devoted to marketing.

For the first couple weeks, I had this super-clear plan mapped out, but guess what I didn’t do? I didn’t write it on my calendar. I just had in my head 🧠 “I’ll work on Twin Flames, then I’ll fill orders, and then I’ll work on some marketing stuff.”

I mean…this is just not helpful. Most of my tasks aren’t even on there. 0_0

At the end of the first week, I felt drained and bummed out, because I wasn’t really sticking to the blocks. Maybe the plan just sucked?

Well, having recently reread Atomic Habits I knew I needed to make this schedule as easy as possible to follow, and I also needed to feel a hit of accomplishment when I stuck to it, so I wrote each of my blocks down on my day planner with a big ol’ checkbox next to each one.

Lemme tell you…

It felt SO DAMN GOOD checking those boxes off that after a mere two days I was hooked. 🙌

I also denoted the length of time for each task except tiny food (because that one depends on how many orders I receive each day), and this ended up making a surprisingly big difference.

Why?

Before, I might work on Twin Flames first thing for 2-3 hours, and by the time I finished tiny food after that, I was usually toast. I didn’t have anything left in the tank for writing Portal lessons or marketing. But by limiting myself to one hour, I was staying well below my burn-out threshold. ⏳

This meant I was frequently finishing work by 2:00 p.m. or some days even noon! On these shorter days, I would take a walk or let one of the (not really) feral (anymore) cats inside for Special Playtime, allergies be damned, and then later, I might feel inspired to do another hour of writing because my brain wasn’t a hunk of Swiss cheese.

This is the love of my life, Gustav Lion Bear. (Sorry, husband–you’ve been replaced.)

By the end of the week, even if I didn’t work extra hours, and I just hung out with Gustav instead, I was getting loads more done than when I routinely worked until 5:00 p.m.

About a week after this checkbox revelation, I noticed another spot of friction: overly vague action steps. For example:

Some of these checkboxes are more like check-trapezoids.

I quickly learned that “1 hr marketing” was a recipe for overwhelm. If I left the decision-making until the appointed hour, I’d waffle between a dozen potential marketing tasks without getting any of them done.

Solution?

The night before, I now add specific notes to my calendar, eliminating the energy-intensive decision-making in the moment, so I can use that energy for the task at hand instead. Doing it the night before allows for some flexibility, so it doesn’t feel like my schedule is cast in concrete weeks in advance.

My handwriting hasn’t improved, by my follow-through sure has!

It sounds simple, but it was a game changer.

Alright, what does this have to do with Jungian Magic?

Something we’re exploring next month in the Portal is the relationship between psychological complexes + magical power.

Here’s the nutshell version:

Complexes are energy centers within the psyche that predispose us to seeing and reacting to present-day events like we did in the past.

When a complex takes over, our level of conscious choice decreases. We’re more apt to respond in habitual, not intentional, ways.

Jung called the energy available for conscious use “will,” and in magic, will is symbolized by the wand.

The Witches Tarot By Ellen Dugan

Therefore, in Jungian Magic, the more you liberate energy from unconscious patterns, the stronger your will/magic wand.

That’s all well and good, but what does this have to do with my time-management experiments?

Well, a big part of building habits is tapping into the positive aspects of unconscious programming, a big one being that we don’t have to think about it.

If we imagine our energy for the day as a pitcher of water, there’s only so much we can pour into various cups before we run out.

So, I could pour half of my pitcher into the “figuring out what I’m doing today” cup, or I could just have that decision pre-made, liberating the entire pitcher for doing the tasks at hand.

I want to have plenty of will/wand energy at my disposal when I’m, say, sitting down to write the Portal or Twin Flames, so I can pour lots of magic into those projects.

For instance, lately I’ve been working with my guides to turn the entire Twin Flames series–I have 22 books planned, one for each of the tarot’s major arcana–into a giant sigil (a hypersigil, if you’re feeling fancy).

While this is still an idea-in-progress, here’s the gist:

As many of you know, I only began writing Book One because my spirit guides suggested it, and initially, I thought the idea was positively nuts. My guides claimed that writing romance would change my life, and given that we’ve been working together for decades and I trust them, I figured I should at least give it a shot.

Wow, were they ever right. 🤩

Not only is Twin Flames incredibly fun and satisfying to write, I have learned SO MUCH about my own creative process:

How does this connect to turning the books 📕 into magical sigils?

Well, since I began writing the series, I’ve been able to channel this Twin Flames flow into other areas of my life, from creative projects to personal goals, and this is what I want to do for readers.

​By sigilizing this energy current, I want the act of reading Twin Flames to activate the reader’s creative flow, helping them move from sparkly idea to finished result with more ease.

And I’m excited to do this because I want to live in a world where more people are creatively fulfilled. I want to see the results of their one-of-a-kind expression! I want to have conversations with creatively juiced-up people! I want to learn from folks who are experimenting + taking risks + forging new creative territory!

If Twin Flames (and my other work) could play a role in creating that world, then I want to make damn sure I’m not frittering away my energy and magical power on things like deciding whether to post to Instagram or tweak my website today.

Liberating energy from unconscious complexes, so I have more will/wand power at my disposal, combined with “assigning” tasks to the unconscious by turning them into habits = more energy to do really cool stuff.

If you want to reclaim energy that’s currently roped into unconscious programming, I’d love to see you in the Portal. We’ll be using a Jungian Magic energy practice to do precisely that in our February lessons.

You’ll also get to peek behind the curtain to see how I developed the technique, which involves breaking down a funky psychological process called projective identification.

If you’ve ever felt like someone was trying to get you to act a certain way, only to blame you for acting that way (like triggering your anger and then criticizing you for being “such an angry person”), you won’t want to miss this break-down!

Happy Full Moon 🌝🦁

Melissa

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