The WIP template
Tiny Tortoise #1: a helpful little resource for your weekly catch-up
I’m still very much experimenting with this space — when I want to write, how I want it to feel, what I want to offer. But one thing I am sure of is that I’d like to give myself space to be different things within these lovely digital walls.
Funny and serious and practical and abstract and planned and spontaneous and purposeful and delightfully useless. I want to try things out, see how they’re received, and just as importantly, how they feel to me. (Because writing from a place of ‘should’ is not sustainable long-term. Writing from a place of curiosity and fun and creativity and ‘what if?’ is an entirely different experience, one which I can see myself doing for many more years.)
So, I’m going to experiment with a new type of post called Tiny Tortoise where I write about very very small changes/experiments/tools that are slow living related, or at least slow-adjacent. This week I’m offering something hands-on.
In this post on tools I use to slow my life, I wrote in-depth about our weekly WIP meeting, where Ben and I sit down together on a Monday morning to look at and plan the week ahead (think: work projects, appointments, meals, after-school activities, social events, intentions, to-dos etc). At the end of that post I asked if you’d be interested in a downloadable WIP template, and lots of you said yes.
So, as the first official Tiny Tortoise post, here it is, ready for your downloading pleasure:
I based it pretty closely on the format of the hand-scribbled lists I make during our WIPs, and tried to keep it as simple and as flexible as possible. I also kept the spaces relatively small on purpose, to avoid creating overwhelming and unrealistic to-dos. You can use it to keep track of weekly:
intentions
appointments, meetings, events etc
meals and batch cooking
life admin
to do lists
Hopefully you find it helpful.
Before I go, just a quick note about emails and notifications. If you’d prefer not to get an email every time I post something new (which is very understandable, given how noisy our inboxes can get) you can opt in or out of receiving emails by doing the following:
Navigate to your Settings page via www.substack.com/settings.
Scroll down to Subscriptions, click on The Tortoise.
Toggle on/off the emails you would/wouldn’t like to receive.
(Pro-tip: This is also where you can opt out of the marketing emails Substack sends everyone automatically — decidedly not my favourite feature of this otherwise pretty great platform.)
That’s it for this lovely Tuesday. I hope your week is going well. I’ll be back with you in a few days.
Brooke xx
I love the idea of adding a bit more structure to these types of conversations - thank you for the template!
Love your smiley coffee. 😁 Thank you for the WIP. I use a normal diary and this will give hubby and I an overview of our week.