Whatever's on my mind

Season 4 starts Monday (yes, a Monday)

Let's get the elephant out of the room first. In July I wrote a whole post called Wait, it's not Monday, about how "I'll start Monday" is the sentence that stops things ever starting. And now I'm starting a season… on a Monday.

In my defence, there's a difference between "Monday" and a Monday.

What I railed against in July was the floating Monday: the "I'll start Monday" that slides to next Monday, and the one after, forever. That Monday is a way of putting it off. This Monday is different. It has a date (Monday 5 October), a reason, and a plan attached.

The reason: it's the King's Birthday public holiday and the last day of the school holidays. Add up four kids' worth of school years, my own thirteen, and the years I worked in a school between uni and babies, and I've been living by the school term for well over fifty years. Eleventy billion, basically. I'm conditioned to be productive in term time, so instead of fighting it, I'm building the whole calendar around it. The seasons start with the term, and the resets land in the holidays when routines fall over anyway.

And the research I quoted back then actually backs a dated Monday. The fresh start effect (Dai, Milkman and Riis, 2014) found landmark days like Mondays and new terms genuinely do boost motivation. The trap is only when "Monday" never arrives. Pair it with a specific plan, what the research calls an implementation intention, and a Monday stops being an excuse and becomes a launchpad.

So: not someday Monday. This Monday. With a plan. I'm counting that as growth.

Here's what's actually changed, and why.

Season One went quiet. If you've read the last few posts, you know why: a big trip, losing Marlin, full work weeks and on-call. I stopped logging somewhere in August and never really came back. Rather than pretend otherwise or drag myself back to a half-coloured cottage, I've done what this whole thing is supposed to be about. I've reset.

The new rhythm: four seasons a year, in school terms. Each 73-day season now runs during the school term, and the resets land in the school holidays. Holidays are when routines fall over anyway, so that's where the rest now lives. Then there's a proper Wind Down over Christmas and New Year.

• Season 4, 2026: Mon 5 October to Wed 16 December (my field test, solo, documented)
• The Wind Down: 17 December to 3 January
• 2027: Season 1 from 4 January, Season 2 from 4 April, Season 3 from 3 July, Season 4 from 1 October

The new season pages are free. One page per season, with tick boxes for Home, Heart, Body and Soul on every day, week XP, the level ladder, your four Grace Cards and the pamper pot. There's a Queensland edition with public holidays and school terms, and an anywhere edition with a blank key dates box. A3 for the wall, A4 for your planner. Grab them on the Semi Sorted 73 page.

Five new printables are up on the Resources page too: the Weekly Reset Checklist, Simple Meal Planner, Fortnightly Budget Tracker, Just One Thing Habit Tracker and Perimenopause Symptom Tracker.

The Semi Sorted 73 booklet launches on Boxing Day. Season 4 is where I field test every page, so it'll launch with a whole real season behind it.

And 2027 Season 1 is the one we do together, starting Monday 4 January. (Another Monday. I know.)

Near enough is good enough. Semi sorted, still becoming. See you on the 5th.

Random updates from a full few weeks

A bit of a brain dump, because life has been lifeing.

Maeve. Maeve has epilepsy. She's OK with me sharing that here. It brings its own challenges and its own worries, and I'm not going to go into detail, but it has been sitting heavily with me and it felt wrong to write about everything else and leave it out.

My own health. I've been lined up for an investigation of a polyp high up in my uterus, which could explain several of the health challenges I've had. Waiting is its own special kind of exhausting, but there's also a bit of relief in possibly having an answer.

Mounjaro. It's going well. What I did not expect was the absolute mind-bending weirdness of clothes being too big for me. I genuinely don't know what to do with that. So I'm learning to figure out my style, and what I actually feel confident in, rather than what hides the most. It's a whole new {Body} and {Soul} project I didn't see coming.

And the numbers, because I'm proud of them: one full year of focusing on me, and I'm down 28 kilos. Seven of those came off slowly on my own between 15 September 2025 and 22 March 2026. Then I started Mounjaro, and the other 21 came off between then and 15 September 2026. Twenty. Eight. Not through a perfect streak, not through punishment, but through a lot of semi sorted days stacked on top of each other, including plenty of messy ones.

Dolly. I cried all day. I'm not even slightly embarrassed to say it. Dolly Parton died on 25 August, and I felt it like losing someone I knew, because in a way I did. What's struck me since is reading back through her quotes, the ones I would have heard as a kid without really listening, and realising how much they shaped my values and the things I believe most deeply. "Find out who you are and do it on purpose." "If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." She wrapped big truths in sequins and a laugh, and she spent her fortune and her fame on other people: millions of free books for kids through her Imagination Library, and so much quiet generosity we'll probably never hear about. Kind to everyone, no exceptions. What an amazing role model she was, not just to women or to country music fans, but to humankind.

Some of my earliest memories are of being very little, out on Jervoise, putting on Dolly Parton concerts with Pammy for anyone who'd sit still long enough. Another of my childhood besties was literally named Jolene. (Her brother was my first boyfriend, and I suspect most of the girls at our little school would say exactly the same thing about him. He was a proper "player" even as a Year 2 kid, and rumour has it he still kind of is.) So Dolly was never just a singer on the radio. She was the soundtrack to being small and free on home ground.

The fancy dress party. Our annual fancy dress party happened and it was a huge success: a Murder Mystery this year. It's so weird to realise that many of our kids are now older than we were when we all met. So now we get to watch a second generation of friendship unfold, which might be the best thing I've ever witnessed.

And… I've booked my first cruise! April 2027, three days out to sea and back, with some of the girls from the gym and my high school besties. Future me is very excited.

Generally, happy days. Heavy bits and light bits sitting side by side, which is just what a real season looks like.

Back at the gym (and I actually love it)

I've joined a new gym, reformer and wellness, and I'm there with my gym friends, which helps enormously. They have a coach. I don't, so I'll be honest, I'm kind of winging it at this point, and I had a week where I was unwell and couldn't go at all. But I keep turning up, and that's the part that counts.

What I love:

• Freedom. I can come and go whenever it suits, which, with on-call weeks and four kids, is the only way any of this works.
• Variety. The classes change enough week to week that I'm challenged, and I'm not bored. Boredom has killed more of my fitness plans than injury ever has.
• Machines for literally every muscle. I didn't know some of these muscles existed. They know I exist now.
• The sauna. Enough said.
• The bathrooms. Luxury. I dry my hair with the fancy Dyson thingy (air wrap? whatever it is) and walk out feeling like a woman who has her life together. For about four minutes.

It's funny. Semi Sorted 73 went quiet, and yet here I am doing the most consistent {Body} rhythm I've had in years, because it fits my life and I enjoy it. Maybe that's the lesson hiding in plain sight: rhythms stick when they're built around the life you actually have.

When work gets loud (in a good way) and the 73 goes quiet

Work has been busy. Not bad busy. Good busy, full busy, the kind that's also a bit relentless when you're on call and your phone has to be within arm's reach 24/7 for the week.

I want to say something I don't say often enough: I love my job. It gives me so much freedom and creativity, and I get to do the community-building part of it, which is the bit that lights me up. I feel genuinely privileged to walk alongside the people I do, my colleagues and the people we support. I appreciate every single one of them.

I've never been someone who works for the money (lucky, I know). My soul bleeds on every level if I pour too much into work, or if there's no substance in it. This job is the first one where I've found the balance: it sings to my soul, but it doesn't consume my wellbeing. I fill my cup at work so I have time and energy left for my life. That's the dream, and I don't take it for granted.

But here's the honest bit. Between the trip, losing Marlin and on-call weeks, Semi Sorted 73 stopped. Not dramatically. No big "I quit". It just went quiet. I stopped logging, and then I stopped checking, and then the fridge page became part of the fridge.

The old me would have written that off as proof I can't finish anything. The current me is looking at it more kindly and more curiously. The rhythms didn't fail because I'm lazy. They failed because the season didn't have a plan for real life happening all at once. That's a design problem, not a character problem, and design problems I can fix.

More on that soon. For now: work is good, life is full, and semi sorted is still enough.

Goodbye, Marlin

When we got home from up north, Marlin looked rough. He wasn't walking properly, and he hadn't been eating while we were away. We knew. I think he knew too.

Here's the part that still catches me. Marlin came home to us from Jervoise, the same place I'd just been standing, feeling more at home than I have in years. He was a gift from Pammy, my best friend since we were tiny, so he's always felt like a little piece of home and of her. And it was ten years to the week since we brought him home that we made the decision to say goodbye. You couldn't write it.

It was peaceful, and it was loving, and I know it was the right thing. He missed Bruce. He hadn't been himself since, and he wasn't happy. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone you love is let them stop hurting, even when it breaks something in you to do it.

That dog ate everything. It wasn't uncommon to see him trotting around the yard carrying a plank of wood, and where he got it from, nobody knows. Once it was a small axe. An axe! Lately he'd discovered a deep and serious love of bananas, and I still haven't quite stopped buying "extra for Marlo".

It's been really tough on the kids. Three pets in nine months is a lot of goodbyes for small hearts, and for bigger ones too. We've talked a lot, cried a lot, and told a lot of Marlin stories.

I miss him in little ways. It's weird not having a big outside dog. Where do the scraps go now? Peggy and the two cats are happily coming and going as usual, and there's comfort in that, but the yard feels bigger.

Grief doesn't fit on a tracker, and it shouldn't. If you're in a season like this one, this is your permission slip to let it be the whole season for a while.

Rest easy, big boy. Ten years of being the best (and the hungriest).

Up north: home ground, green water and first flights

We're on our way home, and I'm still a little bit sunburnt and a lot full-hearted.

Townsville first, catching up with family and friends, the kind of catch-ups where you pick up mid-sentence from the last one years ago. A family friend lent us their car for the entire trip (legends), and we convoyed all of us north to Cairns. I made everyone stop at the places I used to live. The kids were very patient about me pointing at houses and saying "that's where I…" at least a dozen times. We called in on family along the way, because up there everyone is family if you go back far enough.

Two nights in Cairns, and a ferry out to Green Island. Snorkelling in water that colour does something to your nervous system that no amount of scrolling ever will. I highly recommend it as a regulation strategy.

Then the highlight. We drove out to Jervoise, and I can't explain it any better than this: it felt like home. Walking on home ground. This is where I spent so much of my childhood, most of it glued to my best friend Pammy (who, fun fact, went on to have her second daughter on my birthday, 16 years ago now). There's a particular kind of quiet out there that settles something in me I didn't know was still waiting to be settled. I stood there longer than anyone needed me to.

Back to Townsville for one last night, then home. Oh, and this was the kids' first time flying, which added its own lovely chaos to the whole thing. Window seats were negotiated like international treaties.

Now for the honest bit, because that's the deal here. Semi Sorted 73 did not come on holiday with me in any meaningful way. The fridge page stayed on the fridge. I told myself Grace Cards would cover it, and for a day or two they did, and then I just… stopped logging. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I will say is that a trip like this was a whole season's worth of {Heart}, even if not a single piece of the cottage got coloured for it.

Fantastic, memorable, fun. Semi sorted, still becoming.

Season One, Day 5: it's a game now

Three days ago I wrote about changing the tracker on Day 2. It's Day 5 and I've changed it again, properly this time, whole structure. Because: me! Except this one isn't a perfectionist wobble, and I want to be honest about the difference, because the difference is the whole point of documenting this thing live.

Here's what actually happened. The observe-plan-prep week I so carefully built on Day 2, backed with all that lovely research about preparation? By Day 4 it was boring me out of my own challenge. Watching your days without acting on them turns out to be a genuinely terrible fit for a dopamine-seeking brain, and mine did the maths immediately: skipping a day cost nothing, nothing happened either way, and the reward was 68 days off. I designed the thing, and I was already drifting by Wednesday.

That's not a me problem, though. That's the design flaw in nearly every habit challenge going: the payoff arrives at the end, and the end is forever away. 75 Hard patches the hole with punishment, miss a day and you restart from zero, which works right up until it doesn't and then it takes your whole sense of self down with it. Yeah, nah. So I went looking at what actually keeps people moving, and it turns out the answer has been sitting in loyalty cards all along. There's a thing called the goal gradient effect: people speed up as a reward gets closer, the classic study literally watched people buy coffee faster the nearer they got to the free one. And its cousin, the endowed progress effect, found people are far more likely to finish something when they can see progress already on the card. Visible, frequent progress isn't a gimmick. It's the mechanism.

So Semi Sorted 73 is now a game, and I mean properly. Every day earns XP. A Did Something day, one real thing in each pillar, 15 to 30 minutes all up, earns 5. A Nailed It day, the full rhythm when capacity allows, earns 10. There are levels, ten of them, front-loaded so the first ones come quick. Sundays are Boss Battles now, the weekly reset with a name and a grudge: the Kitchen Boss, the Budget Boss, the Appointment Boss, also known as the GP booking I've been dodging for months. Beat one and the day scores double.

The Ugh, Fine tier didn't survive the rewrite, and I'll admit I was attached to the name. It's been replaced by something better: Grace Cards. Four of them, one in each pillar colour, and any card covers anything. Play one on a whole day that falls over, streak safe, zero shame. Or play it on the single pillar you had nothing left for, and the rest of the day still counts. Sick kid, card. Had a walk and a cuppa in me but absolutely nothing for the house, card on Home, day still scores. They're limited so they mean something, and beating a boss wins one back. The one rule hasn't moved: never miss three days in a row. No streaks. Streaks punish, rhythms forgive.

And the tracker? The tracker is a colouring page now. A little storybook cottage on the fridge, and every 5 XP colours one piece of it, in the colour of whichever pillar worked hardest that day. Coral for Home, green for Heart, gold for Body, teal for Soul. By Day 73 the cottage isn't just finished or unfinished, it's a picture of where the season actually went, and if it comes out nearly all coral I'll know I organised my way through winter and forgot my body and my people. Some pieces can't be bought with XP at all: the windows light up as you level, smoke appears once you've beaten three bosses, and the cat only colours itself in after your first comeback week, because of course it does, it's a cat. The sun waits for 350 XP, Season Legend, the season target. The heart above the door gets coloured on Day 73 no matter the score, because finishing a season is the win.

Two rule changes in five days. The old me would have read that as proof the whole thing was broken and quietly shelved it for another year of polishing. The actual lesson is the opposite: the system caught its own flaw on Day 4 instead of Week 4, out loud, in public, and kept going. If the game version holds, it's the shape Season Two ships in, and the shape the printable becomes. Everything's on the challenge page if you want to play along, any start date you like, and the season's being filmed wobbles-and-all on the channel.

Near enough is good enough, even when near enough has XP now. Semi sorted, still becoming. Back to it.

Season One, Day 2: I already changed the tracker

Two days into Season One and I've already gone and tweaked the tracker. Because: me!

This is exactly the pattern that's kept this idea sitting in my head for years instead of live on a page. I start something, I notice a wobble on day two, and the perfectionist voice goes "well, that didn't quite work, maybe tomorrow", and tomorrow quietly becomes never. I felt that exact tug last night. Nearly shelved the whole tracker to go "fix it properly" first. Then I clocked what I was doing, because that's the opposite of every single thing I actually believe. Perfection's overrated. Near enough is good enough. You just get started, and you keep on keeping on. So instead of shelving it, I fixed the one bit that actually needed fixing, out loud, on Day 2, and kept going.

Here's what the wobble actually was. I sat down last night to fill in Day 2 the same way I'd set up every day on the tracker: Home, Heart, Body, Soul, pick your tier, tick it off. Ugh, Fine or Semi Sorted or Sorted, same as Day 73 will look. And something about it felt off before I'd even filled it in. I hadn't actually worked out my cues yet. I don't mean I hadn't decided what to do, I mean I hadn't sat still long enough to notice what my actual days look like right now, this season, this house, these kids at these ages. I was about to start tracking a rhythm I hadn't built yet.

So I went down a research hole instead of finishing Day 2 (very on brand, I know).

Turns out there's a name for what I was about to skip. The Stages of Change model, the one most real behaviour-change programs are built on, puts Preparation in as its own stage, sitting before Action, not folded into it. Skip straight from "I want to change" to "I'm doing the thing" and that's one of the more reliable ways people fall off. Which, hand up, tracks with every routine I've ever laminated and then abandoned by week three.

Then I went back to the study I already quote on the Semi Sorted 73 page, Lally's habit research from UCL. I'd only ever pulled the headline out of it, the 66 days thing, not the mythical 21. But sitting in it properly this time, the bit that actually mattered wasn't the number of days at all. It was that the habits which locked in fast were the ones where the behaviour and its cue were dead clear from the very start. The vague ones dragged for months. So whatever sorting out you do before Day 1 changes how the rest of the days go. That's not a vibe, that's the actual finding.

And then there's the planning research, Gollwitzer's implementation intentions, decades of it, most recently backed up again in a 2024 review of over 600 studies. People who make an actual "when this happens, I'll do that" plan follow through at roughly three times the rate of people who just mean to. Three times. Just from writing the if-then down instead of leaving it as a nice idea in your head.

So here's what I've changed. Days 1 to 7 of the tracker are no longer a normal rhythm week. I've tagged them Observe, Plan, Prep instead. This week I'm not chasing tiers. I'm watching what actually happens in my real Tuesday, noticing where the friction already lives, and writing down the specific cue for each rhythm before I ask myself to do it on repeat. Day 8 is when Rhythm properly starts, and I reckon it'll hold better for having a week of actual noticing underneath it instead of me guessing on Day 1 and hoping.

This is exactly why Season One is the live one. I get to catch things like this mid-run and just fix them, instead of sitting on the idea for another year polishing it into something that never launches. If Week One as Observe, Plan, Prep holds up by the time I hit the reset week, it's going straight into how Season Two is built too.

Near enough is good enough, even (especially) when near enough means changing your mind on Day 2. Semi sorted, still becoming. Back to it.

Semi Sorted 73: I've started

A few days ago I wrote about needing to just start. So: I've started. Today is Day 1 of Semi Sorted 73, a 73-day challenge across all four pillars, Home, Heart, Body and Soul. Not 75 Hard. Deliberately not. This one has exactly one rule: never miss three days in a row. Two days off is grace, not failure.

Season One is an experiment, honestly. This idea has lived in my head forever, and instead of polishing it for another year I'm running it live and documenting what happens on the channel, the good days, the meh days, and the days ticked out of pure stubbornness.

The other trick is that every day comes in three sizes. There's a two-minute version of showing up (I've named it the "Ugh, Fine" tier, because that's the noise I make doing it), a 15-minute version, and a proper one for the days with actual capacity. Which means there's no falling off, no starting again Monday. You can't fall off something that fits inside two minutes.

My Season One runs 8 July to 18 September, but you don't have to wait for my dates or match them. The challenge page has a little season calculator: pick your own start date and it maps your Day 1, your halfway, your Day 73 and your reset week. Start tomorrow, start next Monday, or wait and join Season Two with me on 26 September. The printable season calendars are free either way, no sign-up, moon cycles included, both hemispheres covered.

Semi sorted is enough. Day one is done.

Wait, it's not Monday

Before anyone asks: yes, I know today's a Wednesday. That's not a typo, and it's not me losing count either. I chose it.

I couldn't tell you how many times "I'll start Monday" has been the exact sentence that made sure something never started at all. Monday comes, something's on fire, and the plan quietly slides to next Monday instead. Repeat that enough times and next Monday becomes a season you never actually enter. I know because I've done it more times than I'll admit to on a public website.

There's an actual reason Monday pulls at you like that, and it's not just in your head. There's a bit of research called the fresh start effect (Dai, Milkman and Riis, 2014) that found people really are more likely to chase a goal right after a "landmark" moment, a Monday, a new month, a birthday. It's real, gym visits spike about a third at the start of a week. But the flip side nobody talks about is what happens when you miss that landmark. You don't just start on Tuesday instead. You wait for the next one. That's the trap, not Monday itself.

So Day 1 is a Wednesday, on purpose, smack in the middle of a completely unremarkable week. No new month, no new year, nothing lined up to make it feel significant. Just a Wednesday I happened to be ready on. If it can start here, it can restart on any old Tuesday too, which is rather the whole point of a rhythm over a routine.

Sunday's not Day 1 either, and that one's simpler: Sundays are check-in day, not start day. It's the day I actually have a bit of flex in my house to sit down honestly and ask how the week went. Different job, different energy, doesn't need to double as a launch pad too.

So there it is. Not Monday, not Sunday, just a Wednesday that was ready when I was. Day 1's done either way.

Rhythms over routines: why my schedules kept failing and my rhythms don't

I have written a lot of routines in my life. Beautiful ones. Colour-coded ones. Routines with start times and laminated intentions. And nearly every one of them died the same death: one chaotic morning, one sick kid, one alarm that didn't happen, and the whole thing collapsed like it was never there. For years I thought that was a me problem. It's not. It's a routine problem.

A routine is welded to the clock. Walk at 6, journal at 9, reset the kitchen at 7:30. When the clock slips (and in a house with four kids, two dogs, two cats and a full-time job, the clock always slips) the routine registers it as failure. Miss the time, miss the day. Miss a few days and the perfectionist brain files the entire system under "ruined" and quietly starts waiting for the next new year, the next Monday, the next round number.

A rhythm is welded to an order instead. My day does start at 5am, and I love that it does, but the rhythm isn't the 5. It's what comes next, in what order: my Sunrise Starts. And it's not just mornings. Sections of my day each have their own start, a small sequence that sets that part of the day back to zero: surfaces cleared, calendar glanced at, what's-for-dinner answered, brain unclenched. When the 5am doesn't happen, and some days it doesn't, the rhythm just runs smaller and later. It's still the rhythm. A rhythm bends where a routine breaks.

The house this all runs in has changed, too. When I first started vlogging, the mess was toddler mess and the problems fit in a nappy bag. The kids are bigger now. The problems are bigger, the mess is different, but they can do a lot more for themselves than they could back then. What hasn't changed is my dopamine-seeking brain, and I so wish I'd had a structure back then that actually made sense to it, instead of one more schedule designed for someone else's brain entirely.

Because motivation is a rubbish foundation and I've stopped building on it. Motivation is weather. Rhythm is climate. I love the fresh-start feeling of a new year as much as anyone, which is exactly why I want to engineer it into the calendar on purpose, in seasons, rather than waiting for January to hand it to me once a year and take it back by February.

The test I use for any new rhythm is simple: could I still do some version of it on a 6/10 day? Not a good day. A Tuesday where everything went sideways. If the answer is no, the rhythm is too big, and I shrink it until the answer is yes. Self-awareness beats self-judgement, and a tiny rhythm that survives real life will take you further than a perfect routine that only works in the version of your life where nothing goes wrong.

There's a 73-day version of this thinking that has been living in my head forever: four rhythms, three sizes of day, one rule. I keep thinking about doing it. I need to just start. Maybe this week.

Starting the blog, near enough is good enough

I've been dabbling with this website for weeks now, printables, pillar pages, a newsletter that's given me more grief than it's worth some days. This blog is the bit with no pressure attached. No content calendar, no perfect launch post, just me writing when I've got something worth saying.

If you're here from YouTube or the free Facebook group, welcome. If you're new, have a poke around the four pillars, grab a free printable, and I'll see you in the next post, whenever that ends up being.