the best baked plans

half-baked october books 📖

I want you to think of THAT project. You know the one. Maybe it’s a house renovation, an improvement to your health, or a project at work that you knowwww would make your life 10x easier…if you were actually able to get it done. Now I’m not talking about that project you’re putting off. In fact, you really want to do this one! But life continues to get in the way and the time you allot to do it always manages to slip through your fingers. Or, once you get into the weeds you realize you have waaay more to sort through than you realized, and this one project is actually 15 different projects in one. Maybe you actually get over the hump of starting it, discerning what needs to get done, and have begun to implement solutions, but living around the half-finished project is causing more issues than if you’d just left it in the first place. Grr.

Welcome to my booking process for the last 12 years! 😅🫠

Okay, that was dramatic. Maybe just the last 12 months. But it’s true that booking orders has always been a huge challenge for me since I started making cookies. It’s a tension to hold to both 1) honor every inquiry that comes my way and 2) honor my limited physical and creative capacities. For the first 11 years of CITK I was also honoring 3) my identity as a student, which was at best a useful trump card and at worst another frustrating constraint to work around. (As a funny aside, when I was in middle school I had to check with my parents before I took any orders and emailed a client that I had to do so before I accepted her order. She told me later she had thought, “why in the world would you need to ask your parents??” as she didn’t realize I was a teenager until she came to pick up the cookies!)

a fun relic I found at home last month of my OG booking process / an order for my late grandmother :’)

Back then, cookies were on a much smaller scale—to my advantage and my disadvantage. Now, full time cookies are on a much larger scale—to my advantage and my disadvantage. I’m able to celebrate so many more people, say yes to exciting larger projects, and get to do what I love (mostly) every day (looking at u admin days 👀), yet there lies a never-ending inbox, late late nights like never before, and the limitless decision fatigue of figuring out my schedule every day.

This isn’t surprising, but it is new.

I knew this was the next step to take with my business; there wasn’t anything to do but jump in the deep end and experiment as I go! (And be okay with getting some water up my nose.) My pastor said in a sermon last year that “growth makes it hard to maintain health,” which was very encouraging as I experienced the growing pains of going from maaaybe 4-5 cookie orders a month to 5-6 orders a WEEK. I could only theorize what full time cookies would or should look like. I knew I needed boundaries for how much I took on, when I worked, how I worked. But what were they?

My counselor recently told me that wisdom is not something you’re born with—it is forged. And I believe boundaries are something to forge too. I think conversations around boundaries can miss that sometimes in order to establish them, you have to first cross the line to know where it ends. It might not be total protection from failure, rather, encouragement to keep you from failing in that same way again. That doesn’t mean you’re not caring for yourself or for others. (Nor intentionally crossing wise pre-established boundaries.) You’re just learning.

Let’s take last October for example. (i.e. the most 🦇sh!t month of my liiiiiife.) I was 2 months into full-time cookie-ing and hadn’t had a single week without pulling an all-nighter since I started. I was thrown for a loop making 10-12 dz cookies for pickup deadlines every weekend, keeping up with client communication and social media, planning for the holidays, and somehow eating and sleeping and being a human. I knew if I kept this up Realistically, I knew I could *not* keep this up. I didn’t want to! All-nighters had lost their high school haze and had become an obligatory occupational hazard. I was tired. I felt like something must be wrong. I wasn’t sure if I was taking on too much work or just working inefficiently. I knew sustainability was my biggest goal, both for my present self and the hope of someday scaling my business. So, amidst attempting to keep my head above water I was also attempting to keep my head in the clouds and look strategically at my situation so I could improve and problem-solve. Newsflash: you can’t really do that simultaneously.

I had a godsend of a week-off at my grandparents to recoup before the holidays and I spoke with my old Belmont advisor on a call about my woes. He essentially told me, “This is just what the first year of business looks like…you’re 22, you can lose some sleep!” He encouraged me to have some grace with myself and to focus on collecting information and ideas before doing anything with it. As a chronic problem-solver, I had to remember to read the whole word problem before jumping to give the answer I anticipated the question to ask. So, I kept trucking on. November and December were just about as crazy and I ended the year in an exhausted heap,* hopeful to make some headway in the new year.

*But the good kind like when you come home from a long trip. You may not ever want to walk that many steps in a day again, but you’re glad you did it.

my view at my grandparents house in the GA mountains last november :)

Then, the mirage of January and the clean slate of a New Year™ (!!) came around. This is my tiiiime! No more first semester craziness let’s SYSTEMIZE BABY. 🤓📈📲✍️📌 I spent an entire week Googling different task management software. I hired someone to help me implement systems and create a time block schedule. I tried to ditch my long-term-relationship with my bullet journal in place of a situationship with Notion. In the end…it didn’t really work. I had the *crisp* realization that trying to fix everything at once is actually a million times worse. And I know more than I think I do! Not every system needs an overhaul. It might just need some trial and error to reestablish a new relationship with it that works for this current stage of life/business. As someone who prefers to create their own structures than be in someone else’s, (wisdom shared to me by a friend describing the difference between J and P on Myers-Briggs) I had to let myself sit in the discomfort of discovering and creating those new structures and boundaries. I wanted a quick fix, but what I really needed was time and perspective. The ultimate antidotes to discontentment :)

Now with a year under my belt and some not-so-fancy-but-they-get-the-job-done spreadsheets, I’m chipping away at the wisdom block and seeing my full-grown business take shape. I’ve learned some helpful boundaries and shifted some variables so that all nighters are exceptions to the rule and not the rule itself anymore. Praise the LORD!! Another exciting thing I learned? (By forging through my accounting on my own for 3 days until I finally got my numbers to zero out, mind you) A huge business win: in my first year of full-time business (and first year post-grad), I was able to pay myself a salary AND make profit!! Woohoo! 🥳 Yet again, praise the lord AND thank YOU all for making that happen by allowing me to partner in celebrating your unique lives, learning your stories, sharing in your significant moments, and honoring your meaningful relationships. It is a blessing I don’t take lightly. 🫶

P.s. remember how I wondered if last October was actually insane for no reason or was just the way it is? Well, I crunched the numbers. In an average month, I make 30-35 dozen cookies and work about 125 total “cookie” hours (i.e. not including admin). Last October I made 55 DOZEN COOKIES AND WORKED 225 COOKIE HOURS. So yeah, that’s definitely a boundary now! Who knew? (Not Oct ‘22 Emily, that’s for sure.) Obviously, Oct ‘23 Emily has everything figured out, I always get 8 hours of sleep a night, I have the perfect work life balance, and my bullet journal is looking better than ever. 😌

Okay that last one is actually true. See my newly improved weekly layout!

One thing about entrepreneurship, and life honestly, is that there will always be a new problem to solve. Or, a slightly different iteration of the same problem you’ve been struggling with. For me, that thorn in my side has been my booking process. I enjoy the flexibility of taking on work that excites me but I’m frustrated by the lack of consistency I’m able to offer y’all’s schedule and my own. I also need some automation so it’s not so tedious and impossible to keep up with the volume of communication. But again, I’m a #createyourownstructure kinda girl! Finding a unique way to keep the integrity of both softness and firmness is quite challenging and time consuming. Yet, this is where I thrive as a business owner! Holding the tension between two different paths and forging my own is something I continually return to as a core part of my being. I have the stubbornness to believe I can do it and the grit to make it happen…eventually. ;)

This whole newsletter is to say, that I’ve sadly decided to not open my books for October. I deeply apologize to any of you that were hoping to place an order and I grieve the celebrations I won’t be a part of. Taking orders right now is a little bit like hosting a dinner party while renovating your kitchen. Sure we could do it, but you’d probably have to eat on paper plates and sit on plastic covered cardboard boxes; It’d be way more fun for everyone involved if we just wait till next month. But something so much better and more functional is coming!! And y’all being here means you’re #1 on the invite list as soon as the renos are complete. I also recommend following me on Instagram as I’ll post on there if I have any random pockets of availability.

As a little peak behind the curtain, here are some things I’m working on (though don’t hold my “Contractor” to them haha, you know how flaky they can be 🤪): a consistent date my books open every month, the ability to sign up for reminder emails for a specific month and send me a soft inquiry / “RSVP”, a waiting list for dates I’m not yet booking for, and a place to access all of your order information and details. The booking system reno of my Pinterest dreams. 🥰

I can’t promise when it will be ready to go—or especially that when it is ready to go that it will be polished and problem free. But I can promise, as my values on my website state (which helped remind me to shift this newsletter from an anxious apology letter to an honest expression of where I’m at) to show up with y’all authentically, creatively, and generously. I appreciate you being here more than you know. And I hope this newsletter could give you some encouragement for the projects/story/problems you’re in the midst of! I promise you know more than you think you do. And I trust it will all get done in time.

See you next month,

Cookie <3