Surprise last quarter frost exploding moon drop!

You may have noticed the full wolf moon reference in the first post (on substack). Astute readers may have seen a moon phase mention on the substack about page. So, what’s with moon stuff?

A) The moon is awesome.

B) Time is a flat circle.

C) Sweet shirts.

3 wolf heads howl at the full (wolf?) moon

D) Why not?

For real though, when I was thinking about how often to send ye olde missive here, none of the “traditional” cadences felt right.

Daily was too frequent (says the guy who has been blogging daily anyway since this thing launched).

Monthly was too infrequent.

Yeah, we get it, why not weekly like a normal person?

Short answer, I’m weird. Less short answer, weekly has never worked well for me. I’m not good at sticking to a rhythm where I do X on Monday, Y on Tuesday, etc. I chase too many rabbbits for that to last long.

The longer answer you probably don’t want and really don’t care about (marketing hack: there’s a whole ‘nother post below this one so keep scrolling!):

I rarely know what day of the week or month it is anymore (example: this email should have gone out at 8:41 as that was the “true” last quarter I guess, I didn’t remember it was today until I was falling asleep last night). I look at my calendar so I know what I need to work on for tomorrow and prepare for/do today, in addition to my never-ending, always-growing task list. I am not, despite what you probably think at this point, a paragon of productivity. (I’m more Oliver Burkeman than David Allen.)

Plus, when you decide on weekly, you then have to decide on which day of the week. And, as a data-driven marketer, that is a trap for all kinds of delay-encouraging tangents: which days and times are best for open rates, how do you optimize your Substack for SEO, is 3 b’s in rabbbits bad branding? Etc, etc.

I do weird projects like this one (and this one) as a counterpoint to my day job stuff. (I get it, the topics covered here make me a liar on this point, I just think way too much about this stuff and most clients are tired of listening to me talk.)

The Farmer’s Almanac turned me on to the idea of planting by the moon and the moon orbits on a regular (non-human tampered with) cycle. So why not plant seeds of thought and ideas on the moon’s cycle via an email newsletter?! (Can’t imagine why clients are tired of listening to me.)

So, in conclusion, I wanted a regular posting schedule tied to a more natural cadence that offered some novelty in the 7x12 grid we do most stuff in.

Thank you for attending my TED Talk.