Part of my radio silence looks suspiciously Mercurial. And maybe it is. Because I am pretty sure these things are:

• Dreadful ad campaign results. (Do NOT run test campaigns when Mercury is retrograde.)
• The complete inability to get a hold of clients and get them to sign their contracts. (Mercury retrograde, mixed with a little Ramadan equals tumbleweeds in my inbox. I always get the regions with the lengthy holidays. Or the constant strike action… Looking at you, France. Actually, I’m looking at France for both those things.)
• Unexplained internet connectivity issues.

The rest of the radio silence is my fault.

A magical life is one that revolves around self-change. And the thing about change is that it tends to change things. Which is where I am at right now. There is more background to this over on my muggle blog (6 Ways Piracy Is A Life Skill) where -coincidentally enough for this week- the post is pirate themed. But not the pirates everyone is talking about in the occultosphere.

No, we are talking about when your magic delivers results.

Have a change management plan

Adding more money, or a new romantic relationship, or a new business is going to change your life.

• Do you account for that or
• Do you just try and mash it into the old framework?

Because the old frame work was the one that wasn’t delivering you enough money or sex or business.

If you read my muggle post, you’ll see that work and a number of other projects are really starting to take off, and my partner is starting a new job on Monday. All of these are desirable, post-enchantment outcomes.

This changes how we run our lives right down to the who, how and when of groceries. (Me. Online. Once a week plus fruit/veg top up. And by fruit/veg I really mean wine.)

Adding new things without subtracting old ones is a recipe for being slightly shit at everything in your life.

Do a debrief

I didn’t really have a change management plan because -silly me- I didn’t actually expect a number of positive results to land all at once.

But I worked out a change management plan during a debrief.

Some new stuff has happened. What are the implied changes for how we live our lives? What are the knock-on effects? Are these actually the results we were after?

Sell your worst performing stock

This is advice I picked up while dabbling in technical trading. It’s similar to the idea of Big Rocks. I don’t necessarily mean ‘sell’ it either, but when you are thrust into some forced innovation, be sure to prioritize the tasks or objectives that are going to secure that positive change and do them one at a time. Not all at once.

Reposition and repeat

Here are some things I have learned writing Rune Soup:

• The last month or so, my traffic hasn’t fluctuated much with the amount of articles I write as long as I write at least three a week (as long as they are good). This means two things: The property has a regular audience, the property is only reaching its regular audience.
• What Wizards Taught Me is very popular but it has an unintended side effect. I comment less because I tend to lurk all week and hoard links. And I miss you chumps. It’s also now so big that it takes up half my Sunday. And I don’t have half Sundays free anymore.
• I have to reallocate my time across all my projects. But I also want to boost back up my levels of occultosphere engagement to where I get the most of of it. (Even when we debate, you all lower my blood pressure and release sweet, sweet endorphins.)
• I can find efficiencies by rolling out new developments across all my projects… So stay tuned for fun new developments.
• The biggest changes will be to WWTM. I’m going to go monthly and it’s going to be a Top 10. (Which is going to kill me but it turns out Google doesn’t really like big long pages of links. Who knew? Plus I think it makes the property more valuable to the audience.)
• Other changes: Less -but higher impact- posts. More commenting.

Once you achieve an objective, you incorporate it into your life to ‘lock it in’… And then you head onto the next objective from this new starting position.

Because innovation is weird that way. It’s just a word you hear in TV commercials unless you find some way of making that positive change in your life permanent.

Onto the next thing then.