Jessica's Friday Five: Plot twist with our foster kitten project
Published 25 days ago • 4 min read
Hi Reader,
Many people in my part of the world are experiencing extreme heat this week. I hope you are finding ways to stay cool. In my little family, our volunteer foster kitten project has come to a close, with all the kittens being adopted by amazing families. In an unexpected (or maybe entirely expected?) twist, we ended up being one of the adoptive families. We just couldn't let go of little Jake. I shared about him on my Insta and Facebook this week. He's the cutest.
Oh, and congrats to these 3 Friday Fivers who won a book of your choice in last week's contest to celebrate reaching 14k subscribers to this email newsletter. Please email me your address and the title of the book so I can purchase it and send it to you.
An OTC supplement to consider: You have probably heard that magnesium is essential for a bunch of processes in your body, but if you're like me, all the different types of magnesium can get a little confusing. Thanks to Taryn, a Friday Fiver, who shared this article by a doctor that explains which types are best for various purposes. I currently take magnesium glycinate to support sleep, and it seems to make a difference for me. This article also taught me that Epsom salt is a form of magnesium (should I have already known that?!).
Join me in an act of kindness next Thurs? My brother Nick passed away suddenly in 2015, and since then, my family has been honoring his memory by creating and growing a community of hundreds of people who do acts of kindness every year on Nick's birthday on July 3 (and our community was even featured in Woman's Day magazine!). Nick was known for both his humor and his kindness, and so the ever-expanding #NickWasKind community is a great way to celebrate his life. Using the hashtag #nickwaskind and a Facebook group to coordinate together, this community has done a wide variety of kind acts that range from signing up for the bone marrow donor registry to secretly paying for ice cream for every child at a popular pool to taping up quarters at a car wash to leaving Starbucks gift cards on the windshields of ambulances to treat first responders. Nick was a regular blood donor, so many participants donate blood on his birthday each year as a way to remember him. You can join us in this Facebook group and/or just do a kind act. If you do, I'd love to hear about it! It makes a tough day easier for us.
Share this with a tween or teen you know: I thought this webpage, designed for young people, provided a good overview of how to stay safe online, including identifying red flag phrases, avoiding scammy content, and more. Share it with a young person in your life.
New Tips for Entrepreneur Friends: In my free email series for small business owners like me, this week I added a few new tips - one about the new way I'm tracking business mileage, one about how I invested a few hours last year in a simple system that is now making me a few thousand $ per year with no additional work, and another about how I use email aliases in my business. If tips like these sound helpful, here's where to sign up to get a tiny tip each day for the next couple of months for small business owners/entrepreneurs.
Archiving to Improve Your Email Inbox: One of the bite-sized modules in my Complete Gmail Cleanup Toolkit course focuses on the distinction between archiving and deleting. It shares how to archive the oldest emails in your inbox to reduce stress (research shows that inboxes with hundreds or thousands of emails waste about half an hour per day of your time). One of my newest students, Morgan, was feeling stressed about this step, so I made her a pep talk video to support her. If your email inbox is a bit out of control, watch this and see if it helps. And if you're ready to invest an hour and get your email really under control, this affordable course is your next step.
Bonus Sponsor Resource: Jetlag is a choice if you're traveling this summer: I went to the UK for work two years ago, from where I live on the West Coast of the US, and I was genuinely amazed at how well I was able to avoid jetlag using Flykitt. I have since bought refills for myself and the rest of my family for our trips, and I'm eager to have the same results again. It's a set of tools (like dark glasses, supplements) as well as an app that gives you a personalized plan for when to eat, when to wear the glasses, when to take the supplements, when to try to sleep, when to drink some caffeine, etc. to feel your best. If you've got any travel traversing 3+ time zones coming up, I highly recommend this kit. I asked them for a code and they gave me one - JESSICA gets you 10% off when you're checking out if you've got a trip coming up! They also sell these on Amazon, but I don't think my coupon code works there. This resource is from one of our Friday Five sponsors - thank you to them for keeping this newsletter free for readers!
Last Friday's Most-Clicked Link:This video about how I use checklists for work and personal travel to make life way easier.
