Dear friends,

Just a short message from me today.

I’ve had quite a lot to deal with lately. Switching jobs is no small ordeal, especially when you’re leaving a place that you lovingly worked at for 11 years and 2 months. I feel like the luckiest person ever who got to work with such wonderful people. So many heartfelt exchanges. Both planned and impromptu gatherings happened. It’s almost too bad I had to be leaving for all this activity and expression to be happening, but it’s partly true, we only see each other during weddings and funerals…

The whole ordeal did rattle my body quite a bit. The pressure to hand things off nicely, to brief colleagues well, to wrap small projects up, to clean up 11 years of crusty mess, all the attention on me… My stress and anxiety brought sleepless nights and stomach pains so bad that I’m still recovering from it.

As a result, I spent most of my off days in between jobs in extreme self care mode, incapable of doing anything else. Which totally thwarted my plans to work on my book. I have to admit it looks like I bit off more than I can chew. When I started the project back in June, I thought this was going to be a chill Autumn time.

Well, this Autumn has been anything but chill. Changing jobs is not chill. Being sick is not chill. I don’t think I’ve felt this thinly stretched out for a long time. I remember putting the “End of 2022” time as a “there is no way this project drags on for this long but just in case...” and here we bloody are. Sigh.

On a very positive note, now that I work at Tana I have a ton more time to think about note-taking because it’s literally my new full-time job to do so. As a result my ideas about zettelkasten have only continued to be augmented and fortified by this. I honestly cannot wait to get writing about it in earnest, it is a topic that continues to fascinate and ignite my thinking in many ways.

And I want to help as many people as I can with getting started with zettelkasten crafting, if they believe it’ll help them in any way.

Anyhow, this is the update. I’ll be sending a similar update to folks who pre-ordered MVZK as well.

Thanks for reading, and please stay well and healthy ✨

Sincerely,

Fei

PS. Apparently, according to my writing group, a telltale sign that you have a very robust relationship with a person or a group is when you can freely talk about poop issues 💩. Would you agree?