Single-tasking: A Rituals Workshop

The first in a series of monthly mini-workshops all about tiny, repeated actions to change our relationship with time

Background image by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

Hello and happiest of Sundays to you!

I’m pumped to begin a new workshop series with all my brilliant paying supporters today. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’m able to do this — to write these letters, to create the plodcast and these workshops and retreats — because of your support. I am beyond grateful and really excited to see what the rest of the year brings as we dive into Rituals.

The plan is to release a new mini-workshop on the third Sunday of every month between now and the end of the year. Each will run for 15 minutes or so and all will have some kind of practical element included. (As always, optional.)

When it comes to the principles of slow living, there’s a vast difference between reading or hearing about an idea, and putting it into practice. Because the very act of trying to distil things into a process (which is what I have to do in order to write about them or create workshops) is to truncate them and clean them up.

When you hear someone talk about decluttering, for example, it all sounds so seamless. Even the bumpy parts sound relatively straight forward. “Yes, I struggled to go through the kids old toys but in the end felt much better as I let go of them at the op shop.”

We understand there were struggles, but because of the way language works and the fact that no one wants to read a blow-by-blow account of the reality of decluttering old toys, it feels…flattened and accessible.

That’s one of the things that has frustrated me about writing in this space over the years. I tried to include a mention of it in Slow, with this highly sophisticated drawing:

But even that didn’t quite get to the guts of it. And I think that’s because we can’t. My process will look different to yours, and the things you sail through may be the ones that keep me tangled for months.

There is no substitute for the doing of the thing.

So, long story long, that’s why each of my workshops will have an element of practicality to them — homework, if you will — designed to get you moving towards your version of the goal. Slowly, of course.

Because today is the first workshop, there are actually two videos. The first is an introduction to me, the workshop series and rituals — what they are, how they help, why we’ll use them to turn some of the mundane into the sacred. The second is the workshop proper.

For my non-paying community members, I’ve kept the first video freely available to everyone, while the second video and all subsequent workshops will be behind the paywall. If you’d like to join us, you can update your subscription here:

And with that, let’s get into it!