Hello! Hope your preparations for the Great Pumpkin are going well. Yes, I know I included a clip of the Peanuts Halloween episode last year. Iām not even sorry.
But while greeting Linusās pumpkin time with open arms this week, Iāve also been trying to avoid the other sort of pumpkin timeā¦ the Cinderella pumpkin time when you suddenly realise youāve missed your window and you have to make a run for it, possibly missing a shoe. What am I talking about? Tax.
Do you do your own taxes? Have you started yet? Hmmm? š¤Ø
Seriously, if you havenāt started yet, make time now. Because itās nearly November. Soon weāll be mired in the chaos of December when nobody gets anything done and everything shuts down around halfway through the month. And by the time youāre back up to full speed itāll be two weeks from the deadlineā¦.. Am I giving you a panic attack? GOOD. Honestly, Iām doing you a favour. Get on with it.
I had a rare day off this week and spent almost all of it collecting paperwork and gathering everything into one spreadsheet. Thrilling stuff it was not but the sacrifice needed to be made. Iāve had multiple prompts from my tax advisor reminding me not to leave it all to the last minute. Tempting as it was to reply ābut whereās the fun in that?ā, I thought Iād better get on with it.Ā
Although Iām no stranger to self-assessment, this is my first full tax year as a freelancer so Iāve probably prepared the wrong paperwork and I have a lot of questions. I am so delighted thereās someone to whom I can direct all this. And Iām even gladder thatĀ I donāt have to brave the HMRC helpline. Rather than share my confusion here, Iāll round up everything I discover in a week or two when I know the answers. Look forward to answers on:
earnings from the EU
expenses and working from home
dealing with late payments by employers
I know. More hotly anticipated than series two of Good Omens, right? Youāre welcome.
In other news, Iāve been going hard on curation. For someone who, in a professional capacity, extols the virtues of curation, I donāt seem to be using those smarts in my own life. Looking back at the past couple of weeksā newsletters, I can see that some of the existential career issues Iām talking about have āgeneral overwhelmā at the back of them.
With high-pressure December on the horizon, that general overwhelm is likely to become total. Well, just moaning about it isnāt going to help, so I figured I might as well try to find a solution while I still have the capacity to do so - if it fails, Iāve lost nothingā¦ probablyā¦ although, as everyone in the UK has recently witnessed, it is always possible to further inflame a bad situation and make an absolute pork market of things.
So,Ā Iām going to crash-test some stuff and let you know whether it makes it better or worse. Drum-roll for a new semi-regular feature please ā¦. š„š„š„
Crash-test curationĀ
This week: multiple inboxes
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the fear of a new email address. Iāve been using one email address since I started freelancing and now that account is a binfire. Yet I worried that, by starting again with a fresh work account, Iād miss important emails from existing contacts.
But one idea, provided to me by friend and reader Caroline, is to have many accounts, each with a clear purpose. This sounded like a recipe for disaster - what if I forget to look at one of the accounts? But, thanks to the modern miracle of mail apps, it is possible to have them all in one place and see them all at glance.
So, Iāve set a few up and am slowly syphoning things off into them - the main account remains the first port of call.Ā
Now the important bit: Iām not filing, Iām choosing and curating
My other fear about this approach was that it was just a way of hiding things from myself - like putting things into a āread laterā folder that never gets opened. However, by being selective, I'm making these inboxes very inviting places to be. I currently have an inbox that receives just two newsletters* (so far) and itās become the first thing I look at in the morning.Ā The newsletters are no longer the thing for which I donāt have time, they are the thing for which I make time.
No doubt these inboxes will swell in time but, for now, they are small, controllable and bring order and reason to the email maelstrom.
The only downside to this is that itās not a quick fix. It will be an ongoing project for some time. It is very satisfying though.
* If youāre interested: The Media Roundup (which I recommend to anyone in journalism - it makes me 100% cleverer in 10 minutes) and The Daily Stoic (which makes me braver or calmer, sometimes both).
Friday dance break
Halloween tunes! Spooky tunes! oooooOOOOOOoooooo ā¦ Iāll tell you whatās scary - the length of our Halloween playlist in the shop: 12 hours of tunes and climbing. Itās extraordinary how many supernaturally-themed songs there are. So what are you in the mood for? Here are some highlights:
Something silly? Try The Monster Mash?Ā
If you have the time to watch it, I recommend the hauntingly bad 1980s SFX in the video for Abracadabra.Ā
Halloween denier? Perhaps I can tempt you with Nina Simoneās rendition of I Put a Spell on You.
Soon to become our national anthem, itās Ghost Town! What better way to greet the spectre of Austerity Britain.
Or my personal fave atm, the absolute banger that is Stevie Wonderās Superstition. Try to sit still, I dare you.
May all your pumpkin patches be sincere, with not a sign of hypocrisy. š š»š§āāļø