Hola! Here in The Untethered Flow I’ll occasionally be sharing some of my offerings for small business and nonprofit leaders. If these aren’t for you, feel free to skip them—or unsubscribe anytime if my work no longer serves. No te preocupes. 🩵

I’m an AI Third Bird. Not a Level 12 Gozar power user (though I’ve automated enough repetitive cognitive-load stuff to help me focus more on things that matter most) — and not the other camp either, the rabidly anti-AI contingent. I’m somewhere in the middle, using what works, staying curious, wanting a more sane, more ethical, less billionairey version of the AI ecosystem.

The AI tools marketplace is enormous, and finding the combo of tools that actually fit how you work can be harder than it sounds. But that’s symptom-level. The harder problem is infrastructure. The frameworks that live in one person’s head are the institutional memory that walks out the door when someone leaves. The accumulated thinking that should be powering everything, that’s not powering a sustainable system.

That problem doesn’t start at the org level. It starts with the people running them. Including me.

has been framing this idea beautifully in a different way for some time now:

Colonial time keeps you producing forward, never integrating backward.

Meaning, the output pile grows — and your systems should hold that, make it usable, searchable, yours (or the engine of your org) — never gets built. That’s true inside orgs and it’s true of the people building them.

K’iinBody is the system Ixchel built to fix it — and the K’iinBody Build Weekend, June 5–7, is where we build it with you.

Join the K’iinBody Build Weekend →

Here’s what’s included in the system that we’ll build with you side-by-side:

K’iinBody in Obsidian

A locally stored second brain. Your data lives on your machine, not someone else’s platform. Notes, drafts, frameworks, finished work — all in one place, actually yours.

The Stellar World Code

A skills-mapping framework (forked from work by Corey Haines and Paul Scrivens) rebuilt through your personal cosmology: astrology, Human Design, and lineage woven into the architecture. Eight load-bearing elements that map what you do, how you do it, and where it came from. Not a one-time setup — a live architecture that keeps informing how your system grows with you, that is uniquely mapped to you.

Content Dashboard (optional add-on)

A planning and publishing layer built directly inside your system. Your content ideas, drafts, and publishing calendar live in the same place as your frameworks and body of work, connected to the Stellar World Code that already knows how your mind works.

The Stellar World Code and Content Dashboard are what make K’iinBody different from other Second Brain offerings. You might have seen before. It’s not a template you fill out once. It’s a live map built specifically around your cosmology and ways of working, and it keeps shaping how your system evolves.

I’ve been running on it every day. Honestly, I’m smitten with it. I’m biased, but coming from someone who spends most of their time inside geeking out over people’s broken systems, K’iinBody feels like medicine.

K’iinBody is Ixchel’s creation — they built the system and designed the Stellar World Code. I’m joining the weekend as a co-facilitator, bringing an ops and systems design lens to help support what you build in real time.

Limited to 10 spots to make this a massively personalized Done With You weekend (plus we support you for 30 days afterward).

If any of this is landing, and your body of work deserves an actual home, we hope you’ll join us!

Join the K’iinBody Build Weekend →

Saludos,
Jaimey

Hola, I’m Jaimey — founder of Bearfuht Labs. I work with impact-focused small businesses and nonprofits on ops and systems: right-sized infrastructure that gets out of your way and lets your people focus on the work they’re actually here to do.

If any of this landed, DM me, drop a comment, or book a no-strings virtual coffee.

Every trip outside with our dogs is a practice in slowing down and patience. If you’re a dog parent, you know this. Every bathroom trip or walk, they MUST smell all. the. things. I swear our dachshund, Canela, will smell every one of the hundreds of 5” brick pavers that make up our driveway if you let her. Or every tiny leaf of every plant growing from the cracks between them. Or the other two pups smelling what seems like every frond and every pinnae of a sword fern. Or the same damn spot for what seems like forever. LOL. IYKYK

I can get impatient to the boiling point of “OK, you sniffed the things. Let’s move on. I have things to get to.” It’s the Gallop manifestation of my Gallop-or-Graze self. As if I or those things are super important.

It’s usually Ixchel’s voice or something from the Threads dog parent community that gets me to chill out and remember: dogs sniffing the hell out of everything is how they learn about the world, on that day, in that moment. It’s how they gather data and context — how they understand better. Slow and intentional. And when they’ve gathered whatever sniff intel they need, they move on.

I already knew that. But when I’m “in a hurry”... oof. That resistance hits like a truck, usually never in a helpful way.

When I surrender to just being with it — “OK, we’re spending however many minutes doing this, chill out Jaimey” — it’s expansive. My body remembers to relax. I notice things, small things. The complex melody structures of bird songs around me. The way the sun filters and dapples through the forest and bamboo around our house. The way the air feels in that moment.

The softening lets new things in. New ways of seeing. New ideas or solutions to try on something I’m working on. It honestly makes me better at the system/project design I get to do for change-makers. You get the same outcome from a long walk, or with exercise, or meditation, or whatever brings you back to center. For me, the dogs are one of my teachers of this practice.

The World is a Vampire

The world is constantly pressuring us to go faster, to do more, to figure it all out — which trickles down and translates into us doing that to ourselves, way more than we should, more than is healthy.

Astrologically speaking, Uranus just moved into Gemini for the next seven years — which is going to be interesting and disruptive in ways we won’t always see coming. Uranus joining up with the twins opens the doors to innovation and reinvention of how we communicate, how we think, and what we build. Change is afoot. I’m here for it.

[Musical interlude while we bend the narrative toward business…]

When the overwhelm of our systems not keeping up with our work gets loud, the instinct for many smaller orgs and solo founders is to throw tools at the symptoms. Tools feel like progress, and sometimes they definitely are.

But a tool dropped into a context you haven’t fully understood, felt into, or mapped out yet with honesty and clarity is just an expensive subscription you’ll cancel in four months. The trap isn’t the tool. It’s skipping the sniff or the ecstasy that comes on the other side of waiting for a slow-cooked meal.

What I’ve found — and what I try to get people (including myself) to slow down enough to see — is that the right tool almost always becomes more obvious once you understand how work actually moves through a business. How it starts. Where it gets handed off. Where it stalls. What the org is genuinely trying to accomplish versus the symptom that’s currently making everyone crazy.

That’s the context layer. Without it, you’re guessing. And guessing leads to a graveyard of unused tools and workflows nobody follows.

AI is the Loudest Tools-First Banshee

The same trap shows up with AI — probably the loudest, most persistent version of tools-first pressure most of us are navigating right now.

There are a few camps I observe: the all-in crowd building and optimizing and experimenting at full speed; the firmly opposed; and the third-bird contingent — open, curious, tried some things, not totally sure WTF to do with it or whether it’s actually helping. There’s probably a fourth group that’s genuinely agnostic and mostly just wants to be left alone about it. Probably.

I’m in an awesome community of entrepreneurs — the AI Power Lab — who are actively and enthusiastically building with AI. We have a VERY lively WhatsApp group that racks up hundreds of messages every day. Organic idea sharing, real community. It’s fucking divine.

It’s also a lot. LOL. I had to put the group on mute, for my nervous system. To be in the community but protect my focus and attention from 200 notifications a day on my lock screen. The little red badge reading “200” or “300” — oof. That’s plenty. But I’m freaking glad to be part of it, the mutual support of each other’s abundance.

Be Intentional. Without Urgency. You’re Welcome.

I’ve been intentional about what AI tools I’m letting into my life and how I use them — but I do use AI in my small business and in my life almost every day (even if some days I’d honestly rather just hang out with goats and donkeys. Retirement goals.). I’m more Team 3rd Bird.

I just set up a 2nd brain container a week ago — Obsidian and Claude at the center, a few other tools in my regular stack connected in. I’m a week in, and it’s already having a measured impact on how I work. I felt late to the party getting this going. Plenty of people have already been working with this setup for a minute. YouTube tutorials and people are hawking the Second Brain gospel in their newsletters.

But it’s OK. I’m where I need to be. So are you. And the vast majority of the world — of business owners and entrepreneurs — aren’t really using AI yet, and most haven’t fully figured out their operations layers either.

All of this to say, in a very Gemini way, that we should resist urgency wherever we can. Ixchel has this tagline at the center of their work:

Your day is the outcome of your decisions.

Decisions made from urgency often end up as bad ones. Not always, but a lot.

Resisting the reach — getting curious before getting a subscription — is harder than it sounds when everyone around you is moving fast, and the algorithm is surfacing twelve new tools for you to consider every time you open your feed.

But it’s always worth it. In my own work/practice, and for the orgs I’ve worked with — the ones that have the most coherent, functional systems aren’t the ones that adopted the most tools. They’re the ones who took the time to understand their organization first — how their work actually flows, what they’re genuinely trying to accomplish, where the real friction lives.

If any of this is landing for you and you need support, I have two free ways to start: my Ops Health Quiz on the Bearfuht Labs site takes about five minutes and gets you a quick report with three specific things to try this week. Or if you’d rather just talk it through, grab a coffee chat with me.

If you’re ready to go a little deeper, my Unjammed Ops Quick Audit is an easy entry point that gives you a personalized read on your system needs, a DIY action plan, and a 60-minute consult to get you moving.

One of the best things about working with scaling solo founder/operator types of orgs is that they’re a creative wonderland, truly. Every one I get to work with is genuinely one-of-a-kind — specific to that human’s vision, their weird, brilliant way of seeing things, and where they’re trying to take it all. I get a front row seat to their creative lab. It’s one of my favorite things about this work.

Solo founder/operators — and founder-plus-small-team models — run into capacity challenges if they don’t prepare for those earlier in the journey. Someone (usually the Founder) ends up carrying more than is sustainable. Put a finger down if that’s you.

But honestly? The signals that show up in a discovery call, in mapping workflows, or in a systems build itself are so fun to discover. I treat them like little quests on the road of the bigger capital ‘Q’ Quest. The right-sizing of support systems to vision. It never gets old.

I'm working with a client right now, and building a personalized-and-ready-to-scale ops system has surfaced one of those signals:

We’re setting up the CRM component of his system with custom fields that give him richer context across his network — who someone is, how they connect to his work, what kind of relationship he wants to build with them. Good stuff. But to configure those fields properly, we need very specific contextual data that currently lives entirely in his head: how he thinks about each contact, what industry tags actually make sense for his world.

Those are things I could take some liberties and my best guesses, but not necessarily accurately. The relationship intelligence we’re building relies on context that only he carries. So we’re gathering the ingredients through a couple of different methods.

Every build surfaces these kinds of decisions. We get to learn whether a feature they want is serving the bigger, longer-term plan for the org’s growth and impact — or whether it’s the founder keeping themselves at the center of more areas of the business than they actually need to be.

In this case, is this hyper-personalization serving their 1-3 year vision, or constraining it?

The decision to hyper-personalize the data helps him in the short-term — but is it built with a longer-term model in mind? Will it hold up three years from now to tag and organize every new contact in terms of how he’s thinking about working with that person now, and later? That’s worth sitting with.

There’s not necessarily a wrong answer here. But it’s a question that’s worth you asking out loud at some point, ideally before the friction creeps up on you and is suddenly unwieldy.

The point is, in decision points like this (and this is one of many manifestations), it helps to come at it with your big, audacious goals in mind. What’s the vision for how your org or your work will serve people in three years, or five? What does the business look like when it’s really cooking?

What I see pretty consistently is that many systems founders build early — the ones that worked, that got them here — eventually stop fitting the business they’re actually running. Not because anything broke. Because variables we either under-plan for, or because the thing you’re building took off like gangbusters faster than you expected. Good problems. But, still.

If you’re recognizing your business in any of this — the friction, the data that only lives in your head, the sense that your systems are a few sizes too small for where you’re trying to go — that’s the kind of work and collaboration that gets me up in the morning.

My Unjammed Ops VIP Day is one focused day to map where your friction lives in your business right now, design something with you that fits the North Star you’re pointing toward, and give you a full 6-month roadmap and support (plus other goodies) to help you rock the plan.

Not ready for a full day? You can try out my Unjammed Ops Quick Audit. It’s a taste of what it’d be like to work together — a light audit of your current setup, a friction map, and a prioritized action plan delivered to your inbox for you to carry into the world.

Or if you have questions and want to talk through options first, I love that. Grab a no-strings coffee chat and let’s see what’s going on.

“We’re just going to automate everything.”

I see that line in one form or another showing up in my life a lot right now — in ads for the newest shiny tool, in the Substacks I subscribe to, in my social feeds.

(Probably more than is healthy, TBH. I should check into that and spend more time with animals to balance things out. 😅).

I’m 1000% for automating things in our lives and businesses where it makes sense. One of the best things we can do to let more flow into how we work — individually and as teams — is to remove as many points of friction as possible that add cognitive load without adding value.

For overloaded founders of small businesses and other orgs, the question is worth taking seriously: should we fully automate our systems? And what does that even mean?

I had this come up recently with a PM I’m working alongside for a new client. In our discovery call, she told me she was focused on full automation — primarily to get the founder out of the weeds of manually managing his comms. I’m planning a similar track for his broader operations, combined with a PMO (project management office) layer in ClickUp. So it surprised me a little when she said she wasn’t planning to use a work management tool at all.

It made me pause. Most of this founder’s friction *is* comms-related, and if you fix the comms, you free up the founder. But why no work management tool in the stack? No judgment and no need to force a tool into a system that doesn’t need to be there. The question was Saturnian project systems-loving pieces of me talking.

Automation handles the things that should happen the same way every time. A PMO tool handles the things that require a human to decide, own, or escalate. They’re not rivals — they’re doing completely different jobs. Confusing them, or skipping one entirely, is how you end up with a system that works beautifully in one layer and drops everything in another.

The Case for Automation: What the Machine Does Well

Our brains aren’t built for constant task-switching. Every context shift adds cognitive load — and too much of it makes it harder to get into deep focus when you need it, and leaves you gassed by the end of the day. For founders holding a lot of things at once that all feel equally urgent, task-switching can feel inevitable. We can practice time blocking, but we know those beasts wander between pastures without permission.

Automation is a godsend for the repeatable, the predictable, the schedulable. Follow-ups should always happen after a meeting. Welcome sequences for new stakeholders. Reminders that go out whether or not someone remembered to send them.

It’s a valuable layer of connective tissue — letting the machine handle the repeatable things so you and your team have more space for the strategic, creative, and critical thinking work that only human brains can do.

What automation can’t do is interpret context. It doesn’t know that a stakeholder went quiet because they’re reconsidering their commitment — it just fires the next email in the sequence. It executes the decision you already made. It doesn’t make new ones.

I’m a pretty rabid advocate for letting more automation into our businesses, as long as it supports the people within them. Beyond always advising that you manually stress test a workflow before automating it, there’s a question worth asking before you build anything:

Is my business set up to absorb and respond to what the automation generates?

Think about what happens when your welcome sequence starts converting. Suddenly, there are replies to respond to, new contacts to route, and decisions to make about next steps. Or your project update automations start pinging your team — and now someone has to actually act on those pings. Automation creates momentum.

The question worth asking before you build it: Does your team have the capacity to catch what the machine lobs over the wall to you?

Automation creates speed. But it’s worth questioning whether setting it up is worth it if it just replaces one kind of stress with another.

That’s why the answer isn’t necessarily “automation OR a PMO tool?” It’s usually both — doing different jobs in the same system. The machine handles the repeatable layer. The humans steward the judgment layer. And a work management tool is what keeps those humans coordinated without everything routing back through the founder’s head.

The PMO Layer: What Humans Still Need to Steward

A work management system isn’t about checking off tasks. It’s about visibility — who owns what, what’s moving, what’s stalled, what needs a decision. It’s the layer that answers “where does this stand?” without routing through one person’s head. It’s the container the Gods blessed us with for tracking our tangible work to our goals, and to holding our institutional knowledge.

And, it requires human judgment to actually work: someone has to decide who owns the thing, what “done” looks like, and when something needs to escalate.

For orgs where work is complex, multi-threaded, or distributed across a team, this layer isn’t optional. You can automate every stakeholder touchpoint perfectly and still have a founder who’s the last person to know their own project is off track — because nobody built the system where that visibility lives.

If your primary break is that nobody knows who owns the work, decisions are bottlenecking, and things are getting dropped not because follow-up failed but because ownership was never clear, a PMO tool fixes that. Automation won’t touch it.

Which Do You Need?

The honest answer depends on where your actual friction is. A few questions worth sitting with:

• Is your primary problem that follow-up isn’t happening, or that nobody knows who owns the work?

• Are you a team of 2 doing relationship-heavy work, or a team of 8 running parallel workstreams?

• Does the founder need to be the only one with visibility, or do multiple people need to coordinate?

• Is your work mostly recurring and repeatable, or project-based with shifting milestones and handoffs?

Founders who sit with these questions may find the peace they seek is somewhere in the middle. Not one or the other, but both doing different jobs at different weights depending on the season the business is in.

Red Flags To Contemplate Before You Automate

A few traps worth considering and ruminating over before you build anything:

• Automating before a process is cleanly mapped out AND manually tested — it just makes the broken thing happen faster, and now it’s happening automatically

• Adding a PM tool without buy-in from the people who have to use it — that’s expensive shelf decoration

• Assuming “the tool will handle it” is a substitute for thinking — tools execute decisions, they don’t make them, and the judgment still has to live somewhere human

• Skipping automation entirely because it feels impersonal — and then spending six hours a week on manual follow-up, which you could have handed off in an afternoon

* Treating automation and a PMO tool as an either/or choice — and then wondering why half your operational problems are still happening

The question is less “automation or PMO,” vs “what is actually breaking, and what kind of infrastructure fixes that specific fissure?” Often it’s both — one handling what the machine does well, one keeping the humans coordinated. Complementary, not competing.

Hola! I’m Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofit founders find more ease in your day to day. Right-sized ops and project systems that help you and your people focus on the work that matters.

If you’re not sure if your org is ripe to add automations and/or a work management tool now, that’s exactly what my Unjammed Ops Quick Audit is designed to help you surface and decide. Async, low friction, with minimal time needed from you — but with huge return for just $149. You’ll walk away knowing what’s actually broken and what to fix first.

Not ready for that yet? Let’s chat! Reply or comment and I’ll follow up with you to book a no-strings virtual coffee. We’ll talk through your challenges and give you a gentle nudge down a more specific path.

🖤🩵

Our neighbor Gabby owns a fantastic yoga studio and healing center — Niyama — just up the road from us. It’s become a haven for Ixchel in particular, for yoga, therapeutic treatments, and Gabby’s regular temezcal — but it’s also a hub for neighborhood meetings and fiestas for the community at large. We got to attend our first Posada in Mexico last December at Niyama.

Gabby’s sister, Adriana, taught at Niyama for many years before striking out on her own last year to open her own studio, Kinam.

This past weekend, the three of us — Ixchel, Gabby, and I — were on our way to a film screening at Kinam. Gabby got to talking about Adri’s departure: the separation of two sisters who’d been a team for years, the simultaneous joy of watching her sister build something of her own and thrive, and the grief of not having Adri there as a regular presence in the Niyama business anymore. Happy tears kind of stuff.

(To be fair, Adri and her partner Luciano live next door to Niyama, and the two are still thick as thieves — because family and togetherness are everything in this part of the world.)

There’s a grief that moves through the growth of the things we create and build that I don’t think we’re always conscious of, or intentional about meeting when it arrives. At least not as feelings we label as “grief.”

It’s true for sisters who were running a business together and then suddenly weren’t. And I think it’s true for many founders of small businesses and other orgs.

Two things can be true. We can be joyful — genuinely, fully joyful — that we’ve taken something from vision to purpose, action, and tangible impact on other people or the planet. And we can hold space to grieve when what’s needed to drive the purpose forward has outgrown how much a founder can realistically hold.

That grief isn’t a problem to solve. It’s actually a sign that what you’ve built matters enough — to enough people — to go through these periods of skin-shedding and good grief.

Founders feel this in the letting go of work they once loved. In stopping being the person in every decision. In handing stewardship of something deeply personal to someone else. Many of the bags they’re setting down aren’t just tasks — they’re identity markers.

These moments are exciting thresholds to cross. They are liminal spaces that expand and contract, that want to be witnessed, that are ripe opportunities to celebrate the passing of things, create, and transition to the next iteration of something more fulfilled. Something is ending, and something is beginning.

Both are real, and both deserve to be seen — even when the change is good, even when you chose it, even when everything is clicking.

When Grief Goes Unwitnessed

When that grief goes unnamed — in founders I know, in orgs I’ve worked with, in myself — it doesn’t disappear. It finds other shapes. Friction that shouldn’t be there. A resentment nobody can trace to its source. A founder who keeps circling back to decisions they already delegated, not because they don’t trust their team, but because something in the transition never got witnessed. Systems get blamed for carrying emotional weight they were never designed to hold.

Maybe you’re the founder handing off operations they’ve held alone for three years.

Or you’re an org that’s outgrown the scrappy systems that have worked for you to this point, but are graduating and adulting those.

Or you’re a visionary or creator moving onward and upward from a version of the work that was intimate and small and entirely yours — something that had to change so it could become something worthy of you and the world.

All of it is worth grieving, even briefly, as sidecars of what you’re celebrating.

Something To Try

The practical things you can try (yes to practical things, even with topics like this):

• Name it. Out loud, to yourself first. *This is exciting, and it’s also a little awesomely heartbreaking.* Just as a true thing happening alongside the growth.

• Track the feelings. Take a slow breath or two while you think about whatever the change is that’s happening, the thing you’re letting go of. In what parts of your body does that feel active or charged? Let those feelings land in your body and feel them — without bypassing them on the way to the next thing.

• Write it. One sentence (or more) — what you’re releasing, what you’re stepping into. Put it somewhere you’ll see it for a few days.

• Consider: Share it. Tell one person. A partner, a peer, or a trusted collaborator. Grief witnessed in the collective is more potent than grief witnessed alone.

A practice of expansion like this that makes room for grief can create more sustainable systems and steadier people, trust me. Not because grief is “productive,” but because naming what’s actually happening keeps you honest about the transition you’re in.

You’re not solving grief. You’re honoring it. And that makes more room for joy, too.

What are you excited about right now? And what are you quietly mourning as it changes?

Hola! Im Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofit founders find more ease in your day to day. Right-sized ops and project systmes that helps you and your people focus on the work that matters.

If you’re in a growth season and the ops aren’t keeping up with the vision, that’s where I come in. Click the button below to book a no-strings discovery call and let’s chat!.

Yes, let's do this!

I have a few project/ops searches saved and pinned in my Threads space — including “What project management tool should I use?” It’s equal parts client research and permission to nerd out with other tool lovers and organizers of things.

One recent spelunk surfaced a month-old post I responded to anyway, just to see. They replied that they’d landed on X-Tiles — a tool I didn’t know (new tool dopamine!). It’s Notion-ish, but simpler in design. What struck me wasn’t the tool itself — it was the link they sent me: an X-Tiles template page filled with ADHD-friendly workspace templates. Intentionally designed for how a specific kind of brain actually works.

(Which has since spun me into a whole neurodivergent-friendly project design curiosity hole, but that’s a different article.)

I’m seeing more and more people — freelancers and small business owners alike — asking “What project management tool is everyone using?” on social. Everyone has a favorite. I see a lot of nods to ClickUp, Notion, Dubsado, and others. I’m a ClickUp and Asana fanboy personally, but really just a fan of tools that help people organize the work they’re bringing into the world while reducing soul-sucking, attention-grabbing friction.

Here’s the thing: none of those answers are wrong, and none of them are right for you specifically. Because the question isn’t “what’s the best tool?” There is no best tool. The question is: what tool fits how your work actually moves and how you and your people actually think?

A tool that looked great through the shop window but ends up unused is worse than a simpler setup your team will actually open. I’ve seen beautifully architected ClickUp workspaces that nobody used, and I’ve seen small teams run remarkably clean operations out of Google Docs. The tool is the container. What matters is whether it fits the work and the people doing it.

Before You Pick Anything, Answer These Two Questions

1. How complex is your work?

Are you managing simple to-do lists and repeating tasks — just trying to stay sane — or are you running multi-phase projects with dependencies, multiple assignees, hard deadlines, and deliverables that need to talk to each other? There’s a meaningful difference between “I need to track what’s on my plate” and “I need to see how twelve moving parts connect across four people and three timelines.”

2. How do your people think and work?

This one gets skipped constantly, and it’s where most tool decisions fall apart. Some people are linear and list-driven — they want a clean, prioritized queue and work through it in order. Others are spatial and visual — they need to see everything at once, and a Kanban-style board with draggable cards works better for their brains. Some teams are async-heavy and need communication to live inside the work. Others already have great communication and just need task tracking to stay out of their way.

The tools that work are the ones that match both axes: complexity and cognition. Everything below is a guide to which tool lands where.

Some Notes to Help With That Decision-Making Spaghetti

If you’re ready to graduate into a more robust system, eyeballing a platform switch, or just trying to figure out what the hell to try first, here’s a rundown of some of the most common options out there, with some honest notes on fit.

ClickUp

If your work is genuinely complex and your team needs everything in one place.

This is my primary tool of choice. The learning curve is real — and the possibility of getting overwhelmed before you get started is also real — but the payoff is a genuinely powerful, customizable workspace you can build around how your org actually works. Tasks, docs, goals, automations, reporting, and more, all in one environment. If your team is small and your work is relatively simple, the feature overwhelm might not be worth it yet. But if you’re scaling, it’s worth the investment to learn it right.

Asana

If you want serious project management capability with a gentler learning curve.

Asana is more structured out of the box than ClickUp — less “build your own workspace from scratch,” more “here’s a solid foundation, now make it yours.” It’s highly customizable, the timeline view is excellent for planning, and it tends to get adopted faster by teams that aren’t ops-native. A great choice if ClickUp feels like too much too soon, or if clean handoffs and task ownership are the core pain point.

Notion

If your team lives in docs and databases more than task lists.

When work is knowledge-heavy — SOPs, wikis, meeting notes, research — Notion lets tasks live inside that context rather than in a separate app. Tons of templates, modular, user-friendly, and genuinely beautiful. The caveat: without someone owning the architecture, it becomes a beautiful graveyard of half-finished pages fast. Great for teams that think in documents. Less great as a standalone task manager if accountability and deadlines are the primary need.

Trello

If your work is visual, relatively simple, and you want to be up and running in a day.

Trello’s Kanban board design is intuitive and low-friction — anyone can look at it and immediately understand what’s happening. A great starting platform for freelancers, solopreneurs, and smaller or creative teams. It’s less awesome as the complexity of your work grows. If you’re building a growing list of workarounds just to get Trello to keep up with you, that’s your sign to move up.

Monday.com

If visibility matters as much as execution, and your stakeholders want something that reads well in a presentation.

Monday is a darling for many. Easier to set up than ClickUp, easier for non-ops people to navigate, with dashboards that communicate upward cleanly. Worth knowing: it gets expensive fast, so if budget is tight, factor that in early. Also, not the strongest choice if you need serious automation logic — that’s more ClickUp territory.

Basecamp

If communication chaos is the real problem, not task tracking.

Basecamp’s magic is centralizing project discussion and keeping context out of people’s DMs — less about task granularity, more about everyone knowing what’s happening and where to find it. The flat pricing (one price, unlimited users) is genuinely unusual and worth noting for growing teams watching their per-seat costs stack up.

Airtable

If your “projects” are really structured databases with tasks attached.

When you’re managing a high volume of records — events, grants, applications, client rosters — and need to slice that data multiple ways, nothing does it quite as well. I’ve used Airtable to manage pieces of large-scale events I’ve produced, and it earns its keep in that context. It can function as a lightweight PM tool, but if task management is the primary need, you’ll likely want something purpose-built for that instead.

Dubsado

If you’re a service-based business and your client onboarding is held together with duct tape.

I’m not an active Dubsado user myself, but the fans are passionate, and the reputation is legit. Dubsado automates the whole client-facing pipeline — proposals, contracts, questionnaires, invoices — with more customization than almost anything else in its category. Setup takes real time and thought, and you’ll likely still need a separate PM tool for internal work. Client management system first, project tracker second.

HoneyBook

If you want Dubsado’s core functionality without the setup overhead.

A favorite of creatives and freelancers, HoneyBook puts contracts, invoices, scheduling, and client communication into one reasonably polished place — faster and with less configuration than Dubsado. Less powerful, less customizable, but it gets out of your way. Same caveat applies: pair it with a real PM tool if internal project tracking is a meaningful part of your work.

The Tool Is Never the Whole Answer

Here’s the part nobody wants to hear after three hours of researching options: the tool is maybe 30% of the equation. The rest is whether the way work gets captured, assigned, and completed actually matches how your team thinks and how decisions get made in your org. You can have the right tool and still have a broken system if the underlying logic hasn’t been thought through.

The question worth sitting with before you migrate everything into the new shiny thing: Do I have a tool problem, or do I have a systems design problem?

Before you invest time and money building the wrong thing, it’s worth knowing which one it actually is. My Unjammed Ops Quick Audit is designed to surface those answers, async, with minimal friction.

Not sure if the audit is the right next step yet? I’m always game to do a virtual coffee and talk through your tools questions. Comment below or reply to this, and I’ll reach out to book time with you. We’ll figure it out together, what makes sense for where you are now.

🖤🩵

One of the quiet, unspoken things I’ve loved about living in places like Nicaragua and Mexico — but about LATAM in general — is all of the small acts of collective care that happen every day, that weave together to make the social fabric here.

If you wander through a neighborhood, especially in the morning, you’ll invariably see homeowners or business owners cleaning the sidewalk and street in front of their building/home/business (at the neighborhood level, the two are pretty intertwined with each other, living and commerce. IYKYK).

Usually a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing the cement with that, and a broom. Clean bucket of water for the rinse.

And maybe this happens in a less frequent or concentrated way in bigger metros or on busy carreteras or arteries. Maybe it’s more common at the neighborhood level, but I’ve definitely witnessed it in more populous places like Managua, Oaxaca, Xalapa, etc.

I’m sure the U.S. is dotted with small towns where this kind of practice also happens, but those mostly live in outdated Norman Rockwell images somewhere in my neocortex. My “life experience” of street and sidewalk cleaning is that there are people and trucks/machines (city or private company) that do that work, including in my idyllic hometown of Petaluma, CA.

There are throughlines I love here. Strong work ethic. Modeling a pride of ownership and appearance. Maybe a little “obligation.”

But the biggest one is an embedded culture of care, of ‘We.’ It’s reciprocity with our neighbors and communities here that’s way more self-initiated and hands-on.

The sidewalk is interesting because it’s a threshold. It’s both public and private. It’s an edge space, a liminal space, a zone of connection — regardless of where you live.

(My Human Design / Artificial Shores environment profile loves this.)

Who’s responsible for it? In the States, with DWPs and HOAs, that’s more obvious. Here it’s more collective. The cities pick up garbage, but the people handle beautification at the small scale. Small actions/fractals impacting the whole.

There’s both upside and downside to having bureaucracy tending to the beauty of our collective and threshold spaces.

I love this as a model for how we can build healthier systems—ones that deliver outcomes, make money, *and* feel good to work in. Systems that nurture our teams as stewards of the impact we’re creating.

When Systems Replace Culture

Threshold spaces in our businesses are interesting because they’re both places where we can check the health of our orgs/systems, and they’re where collective care either lives—or doesn’t.

That might look like:

• Handoffs between team members

• The space between leadership’s vision and how work actually happens

• Interfaces between departments, roles, or tools

These are also places where things can be most fragile. Not because our system or the people working in it are flawed, but because we’re defining ‘who’s responsible?’ through an outdated lens.

Look, I’m not anti-systems. Quite the opposite. I’m a Saturn-loving architect of healthy business operations. I sell human-centric project plans to clients. Systems create essential scaffolding, containers, and clarity.

But I also think we *overbuild* (or “mis-build”) our systems. At a minimum, we don’t treat them like a living organism as much as we say we do.

Hot take, we ultimately design our systems and processes to not trust them.

In a healthy system, there’s an interesting yes/and tension: ‘I’m responsible for this part, but we’re collectively responsible for the whole.’ That tension lives in the thresholds and edges.

Systems that don’t prioritize collective care and stewardship over how we manage our work default to enforcement. Rigid policies. Out-of-touch hierarchies. Oversight (so much oversight). I’ve worked in/with enough corporations to know how riddled our current work systems are with “output over people.”

A More Commons Design for Our Ops

Design systems where distributed care is the default. Full stop. This doesn’t mean “no structure.” It means a structure that’s designed to nurture a pride of care and reciprocity as much as it does compliance with an SOP or completing a task by a deadline.

Name who tends each threshold.

Not ‘who owns this task’ but ‘who makes sure this handoff doesn’t break?’ Who tends the space between sales and delivery? Between project kickoff and project ownership? If the answer is ‘I don’t know,’ that’s where things fall apart.

Tiny acts, daily.

You don’t need a quarterly “handoff improvement initiative.” You need the 2-minute check-in before passing work forward. The quick “is this clear?” before closing a project. The weekly 10-minute standup asking “what fell through the cracks this week?” Small, repeatable care—not big interventions. (Bonus: AI tools can now help surface those cracks faster for small teams.)

Tend edges because someone’s tending yours.

When care is reciprocal, people take responsibility because they trust others are doing the same. When care is enforced, people do the minimum to check the box. Design your systems so that tending an edge—updating the handoff doc, clarifying ownership, checking in—isn’t “extra work.” It’s how work gets done.

Are You Defending Boundaries or Tending Edges?

Think about the last time something fell through the cracks in your organization. Where did it happen? Chances are, in one of those threshold spaces—a handoff, an interface, a gap between roles.

Here’s the question to ask: Is that space clearly someone’s responsibility, or is it assumed someone will handle it?

Edges invite care. They’re porous, connecting, tended. Good ops systems don’t just define roles—they make it easy, and expected, for people to tend their edges. Not because it’s policy, but because work has fluidity that needs attention.

Operations aren’t just about throughput and task management. They’re about building something people want to take care of.

If your business ops or project systems are feeling messy —handoffs stalling, unclear ownership, or work is falling through the cracks — let’s figure out what’s breaking and how to fix it.

Book one of my Audit + Action sessions. We’ll spend 90 minutes mapping what’s actually happening in your systems, identify where friction lives, and build a roadmap for the 1-3 fixes that will make the biggest difference—based on leverage and capacity, not urgency.

You’ll receive a full audit and action plan that tells you what to fix now, what to ignore, and what to revisit later.

Reply to this if you have any questions, or click here to book today.

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I have a colleague and potential client whom I was talking to recently, about upgrading her business and project ops systems across her three business divisions.

When she told me, “Oh, we’ve used Asana and Monday before, but I never understood how to use them,” that told me so much. Not about her, but about whatever consultants were in her life and business in the past.

I’m a consultant. I LOVE to build and repair ops and project systems for purpose-driven SMBs and organizations. And I need to say something uncomfortable about my industry: too many in our industry are taking your money, building systems you can’t maintain, and walking away way too quickly.

Off the shelf project or operations systems without any human-to-human care after you buy the thing create more friction for our clients than they fix, period. It’s a disaster recipe we need to call out, a thing we need to slay.

This open letter isn’t about trashing other consultants. It’s about seeing and helping overloaded small business leaders like you triage and trust what good, supportive work and systems can look like.

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It’s Not a Tool Problem. It’s an Abandonment Problem.

Raise a hand if this sounds familiar:

• A consultant shows up, excited about their framework. They sell you a solution.

• They build you something that looks impressive in the demo.

• They hand you the login and disappear.

• Six months later, your team is back on whatever outdated or dysfunctional system you used before. You revert back to what was familiar or comfortable.

And maybe you think:

Maybe we just need a different tool. Maybe Asana wasn’t right. Maybe ClickUp will work better. Maybe we’re just not disciplined enough.

Stop.

You don’t necessarily have a tool problem. You might have a consultant problem.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

❌ The system wasn’t built for your workflow — it reflects someone else’s ideal process, not how work actually moves through your team

❌ No one showed you the why, only the what — you got a tour of features, not an understanding of the logic that makes it work

❌ You’re still the one running everything — the system didn’t free you up to lead, it just gave you another thing to manage and troubleshoot

❌ Your team can’t see the value — if it feels like extra work instead of less friction, they’ll abandon it the second you stop watching

❌ The consultant disappeared when you needed them most — no transition support, no “call me if it breaks” safety net, just radio silence

If this has happened to you in the past and it’s scarred your trust, I’m sorry. Chances are, the consultant was more focused on delivering their framework than solving your problem, and that’s a shame.

When what you actually need is someone who designs for the team you have, trains your people to use it, and sticks around long enough to make sure it works. The relationship with you doesn’t stop at the “it’s built” stage.

Three Thinking Errors That Keep You Stuck

These aren’t the only ways founders get trapped in the system-adoption cycle, but they’re three common, fixable ones:

“We just need the right tool”

You’ve tried two, maybe three platforms. Each time it felt promising—then your team stopped using it. So you think: *Maybe this tool just isn’t the right fit.*

What’s actually true: The tool isn’t the problem. The implementation is. Every system you’ve tried probably *could* have worked—if someone had built it for how your team actually operates, not how a consultant thinks teams “should” operate.

“This is just how consulting works”

You think: *“Consultants build the thing and leave. That’s the deal. We’re supposed to figure it out from there.”*

What’s actually true: That’s not a good, healthy consulting relationship. Good consulting doesn’t end when the system is built. It ends when your team can use it without the consultant in the room.

“If it’s not working, we must be doing something wrong”

Your team won’t adopt the system. Tasks aren’t getting updated. People keep defaulting to old habit and systems. And you think: *“Maybe we’re just not disciplined enough. Maybe our team isn’t good at following through.”*

What’s actually true: If your team won’t use the system, it’s not necessarily a discipline problem, but a design problem. A good system meets your team where they are. It reduces friction and welcomes ease, not the other way around.

A Healthy Consulting Partnership Should Look Like This

Here’s what’s different when you work with someone who’s invested in your success and growth long after they’ve finished working with you:

Right-sizing: They build for the team and resources you have, not the team you aspire to grow to. They ask what you actually need *right now*—and build that, with room to grow later.

Personalization: They adapt the system to how your team already works. They don’t impose a rigid framework and expect you to contort around it. They observe your habits and design *with* them, not against them.

Co-creation: You’re in the room. You understand the logic, not just the output. When they’re done, you don’t just have a system—you can explain it to someone else.

Leadership freed from the “operator” hat: You get visibility into what matters—where projects are, what’s blocked, what needs your attention—without you becoming the person who manages the system.

Built to feel good, now and later: The system doesn’t just function—it feels sustainable to work in. Six months from now, a year from now, your team still trusts it because it was designed with whole humans in mind, not just productivity metrics.

Handoff with care: The consultant sticks around for the handoff. Maybe that’s a week. Maybe it’s 30 days. Whatever. But it comes with training, walkthroughs, documentation that makes sense, and a window where they’re accessible for lingering questions. They don’t ghost you the day the system goes live.

It’s what you deserve.

What I Do Differently

I specialize in systems that teams actually adopt because they’re designed for how work happens in your business and are capacity-aware—built with whole humans in mind, with room to flex for “holy shit” moments and rest.

I don’t hand you a framework and disappear. I co-create with you, train your team, and make sure you can maintain what we build long after I’m gone.

For quick setups: My Unjammed Ops: QuickStart offering gets you a ClickUp or Asana system up and working in 1-2 weeks, with handoff care built in.

For deeper partnerships (retainer work, custom builds, strategic roadmapping): We start with an Audit + Action session—90 minutes to map your workflows, identify friction points, and build a clear roadmap. If you move forward, the session cost applies to the project. If not, you still walk away with a useful audit report.

This is what responsible, supportive consulting looks like:

• Systems right-sized for your team today and your future trajectory

• Training so your people know how to use it (not just tolerate it)

• Clear documentation you can actually reference

• Post-launch support without abandonment

If you’ve been burned by a consultant who built something you couldn’t maintain, I need you to hear this: It wasn’t your fault.

The system failed you. The consultant who didn’t set you up to succeed? They failed you, too.

But here’s the good news: it’s all fixable.

You can have systems that actually work—systems your team will use, that you can maintain, that make operations easier instead of harder.

Ready to build something that actually sticks?

Reply to this, DM me, or head to bearfuht.com to book a no-strings discovery call. We’ll talk through what’s broken, what you actually need, and whether we’re a good fit to work together. No pressure, no pitch—just clarity.

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One of the biggest stressors and pain points for small business founders/leaders continues to be “operational overwhelm.” If you’re running a smaller-but-growing org or business, I’m not shocking you by telling you this. You get it.

It’s the “wearing of too many hats,” “holding too many bags,” “spinning too many plates”—whatever overused metaphor you like best. Too many meetings that “require” you. You’re the default project manager. Endless administrative tasks you loathe. Slack thread Hell.

And the work that actually needs YOU keeps getting pushed to “someday” (or worse).If you’re nodding along right now, you’re not alone. This is the reality for most founders at this stage.

Real talk that I’m saying with all of the love: some of this is on you. And that’s okay. Some of the pain and overwhelm you’re experiencing is about control, getting in your own way, and not protecting time to spend in your Weird.

Not because you’re bad at this—because you’ve been doing what you had to do to keep the trains moving.

The Imprint Trap

Your “Weird” (capital W) is that thing that’s uniquely you—the Holy Shit idea that sparked your business. The vision to solve a big hairy problem, make a lasting impact, build a community around it.

So of course everything in the early days had your imprint on it. Decisions, habits, processes, SOPs. That’s not the friction—it’s why it worked for as long as it has.

But if your “systems” still look like a menagerie of Google Docs and a Slack workspace, scrappy stops working. You + a small team can run like this for a while, before you hit a wall. Maybe you’re there now.

The “imprint trap” that small biz/org founders fall into looks something like:

• Hoarding all the institutional knowledge that originally sprung from you - instead of building systems that can hold it and make it easily accessible across the team.

• Letting yourself become the OS of your systems - so everything waits on you, instead of work moving through clear processes and handoffs.

• The “if it doesn’t get done by me, it won’t be done right” fallacy - instead of trusting that “done well enough by someone else” is better than “perfect but bottlenecked by you.”

There’s boring infrastructure things to take care of in those alternatives. Ones that require time and energy (but less than in the past, with all of the AI tools available).

But if everything needs your biometric signature to move forward, that’s a recipe for continued pain.

Here’s the thing: you don’t need to hold all the bags to protect what makes your work special. You shouldn’t

But you do need to start setting some of them down—deliberately, strategically, and probably earlier than what might feel safe.

You need systems AND to develop trust to let things go, to clear room for engaging those unique-to-you things more frequently.

Why Letting Go is Hard (And It’s Not a Mindset Problem)

Look, I get it. The advice to “just delegate” is everywhere, and it’s mostly useless without context. Letting go isn’t hard because you’re a control freak (unless you are). It’s hard because:

You might be resource-constrained. Adding people costs money. And if you don’t have the revenue to hire someone who actually gets it, you’re stuck choosing between doing it yourself or training someone who might leave in six months.

You’ve been the glue for so long that stepping back feels like disappearing. If you’re not in every decision, every handoff, every client interaction—will the thing still hold together? Will it still feel like *yours*?

You don’t trust that delegating won’t just create more work. Because you’ve tried it before. You handed something off and spent twice as long fixing it, answering questions, or redoing it yourself. That’s a biggie, trust, especially if past experiences cloud your vision.

Here’s what’s also true: if you keep waiting for the “right time” or the “right person” or the “right budget,” you’ll stay stuck in operator mode while your genius suffers.

Instead of waiting, commit to take small actions. Here are three shifts you can make now—without a bigger team, without a perfect plan, without blowing up what’s working.

Three Things to Create More Space

Stop Hoarding Decisions

You don’t need to make every call. But right now, everything probably routes back to you because the system doesn’t know how to answer basic questions on its own.

Start here: Notice where decisions pile up waiting for you. Then ask yourself, *What would need to be true for this decision to happen without me?*

Maybe it’s:

• A clearer brief or decision framework

• Permission for someone else to make the call (and mess it up sometimes)

• A recurring check-in where you set direction, not approve every move

You’re not abdicating or shirking something vital to the organism. You’re building structure so the business can move at the speed of the work, not the speed of your inbox.

Example: Instead of approving every client communication, create a simple decision tree: “If it’s under $X or fits Y criteria, you own it. If it’s outside that, loop me in.” Done. Now 80% of those decisions happen without you.

Separate “Important” from “Uniquely Mine.” No, really.

Not everything important needs to be done by you. But we conflate the two all the time. Important work can be shared, taught, handed off. Founder work—the stuff that’s *uniquely yours*—is the synthesis, the direction-shaping, the messy judgment calls that can’t be documented cleanly.

Here’s a filter: If it’s a process or task that can be taught or repeated, it’s probably not where your focus needs to be.

Your job isn’t to be the best executor of every task. It’s to set direction, TRUST, and make the calls no one else can make yet.

Example: Client onboarding is important. But is it uniquely yours? Probably not. Build the structure (or hire someone to do that work), train someone to run it, and step back. You can still do the strategy call or final review—but you don’t need to be in every email thread.

Let Systems Hold the Load, Not Your Nervous System

Right now, you’re probably the system. Your memory, your willpower, your constant availability, that menagerie of Google Docs + Slack. That’s what’s keeping everything from falling apart.

That doesn’t scale. And it’s exhausting.

This is your permission to graduate and level up your systems. That doesn’t have to mean spending thousands of dollars on platforms and subscriptions. Right-sized Ops and project systems that are more collaboration-rich are available at budget prices.

What might this actually look like?

• A project tool (ClickUp, Asana, whatever) that holds the work instead of you holding it in your head. Not because tools are magic—because visible work creates accountability and reduces “where are we on X?” Slack threads.

• Documentation that’s good enough to onboard someone without you being their shadow for three weeks. Not perfect wikis—just the basics captured so the next person doesn’t start from zero.

• Stop manually tracking what’s in motion. Use AI tools (like ClickUp Brain, Asana AI, or even a custom ChatGPT setup) to auto-generate project summaries or weekly status reports. It’s not perfect, but “80% accurate without your labor” beats “perfect but crushing your spirit.”

What Happens When You Do

Here’s what can shift when you actually start letting go:

• Fewer decisions chasing you across Slack

• Meetings get shorter because the work moves without you having to track it

• Your team shows up with competence you didn’t know they had (because you finally gave them room to)

• You recognize yourself in the business again—not just as an operator, but as an originator. An initiator.

And, a HUGE bonus — you’ll feel it in your body. The easing of literal physical tension you’re probably carrying. Cortisol spikes from holding too much are replaced by the dopamine of getting to be curious and work ON your business vs. in it.

So let’s be clear about what this is really about. Holding every bag doesn’t make you more dedicated. It makes your business fragile. And it buries the thing that made this work in the first place—your weird.

Trusting and letting go of control or “what worked up to this point” isn’t giving up or “failing” in some way. It’s making space. It’s building a business that can hold your vision without burning you out.

So here’s the question: What’s one thing you could set down this week?

One decision you could stop hoarding. One task you could hand off. One thing you could stop clutching until they pry it from your cold, dead hands. Where could you expand, add, or initiate a little more trust?

Start small, but start somewhere. Your people and the world needs more of your genius and your Weird.

If you're ready to build systems that let you focus on your genius instead of the grind, let's talk. I help founders design capacity-aware operations that restore rather than deplete. Send me a DM or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat. At a minimum, I’ll try to help you identify and solve one point of friction, no strings attached.

The house we rent and call home these days is a constant full-body and emotional deep breath and exhale (metaphorical and literal). It’s buffered by protected riparian forest on either side and behind the house. The back bedroom is a solarium; Ixchel’s studio and sanctum. Its glorious feature is a wall of windows and a deck attached to the back that looks out to this scene:

A few weeks ago, Ixchel started noticing, in their early evening reflections out there, a kaleidoscope of butterflies (Because of course a group of butterflies is called a kaleidoscope. ❤️ 🦋) coming in and settling on different branches in trees closer to the house.

An evening commute to settle in the twilight and nighttime safety of protected forest. It’s our version of the Monarchs migrating hundreds of miles every year.

They generally come in at dusk, maybe a minute or two later each day, as we get further and further from the deep time of Winter Solstice. By the morning, they’ve moved on to do their butterfly things.

The first time experiencing our own private kaleidoscope was pure Wonder — way beyond “oh, neat, butterflies.” It was a visceral call and response in my heart, throat, and facial muscles (probably from gasping and smiling). It was awe.

By the third, fourth, fifth evening, it became ritual; must-see programming, because chasing Wonder (alone and with each other) is one of the best things we can do for ourselves, especially in these especially shitty, dystopian times. Again, awe.

Now I plan my afternoons around their flocking as often as possible. The shared experience of two-to-many—witnessing it with Ixchel, sharing the experience with the mariposas—has become a necessary ritual of connection and restoration for me.

(Sometimes they don’t come. If it’s misty or rainy that day, maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re hunkering down someplace else. If that happens, we still get to witness evening birdsong, awesome trees, and stillness.)

It’s their natural, rooted intelligence, a particular flavor of the Art of Flocking, that has me deeply curious. That, plus a dopamine-rich ritual that’s emerged, dressed up as mystery and magic.

I was “this many years old today” during one of those first encounters when I learned from Ixchel that their migration muscle memory is generations and generations deep.

So it’s wild to me. Butterflies don’t live a long time—sometimes only a couple of weeks, sometimes a few months. But fleeting and short in the bigger scheme. So the ones that came in yesterday aren’t the same set from, say, two weeks ago.

And yet here they are. The kaleidoscope collectively remembers, even when no individual butterfly necessarily does. They find this exact cluster of trees, at this exact time of day, without a map, without a leader, their lessons of arriving a deep, collective memory thread that reaches from way back when and stretches into the future.

I love to try to connect dots and build oddly shaped bridges in my brain between life things — in this case, a devotion to what Earth has to teach us — and our messy but inspired human systems and organization. Between “Lessons of We” that I notice and work I’m called to do to help stoke more capacity awareness in our systems of work.

There’s a kajillion different tiny lesson threads you could pull on here. Instead of trying to force “here’s what kaleidoscopes of butterflies can teach small business founders and leaders,” what’s reflecting back and rippling outward are intuition, embodiment, and even ancestral lessons of belonging we might remember. I

Collective Memory > Individual Knowledge

In our companies, we talk about things like SOPs, “knowledge transfer,” and “information hygiene” all the time. Whatever the equivalent of that is in our community groups. And those things are important to help smooth out all of the ebbs and flows, and transitions of people in and out of a company, team, or collective.

What’s maybe missing in those for me is evidence of the muscle memory, the pattern recognition. Intuition and instinct aren’t always aligned with outcomes and objectives. But are they any less vital to healthy systems than empathy or understanding—soft skills we’ve decided are essential?

Anticipation as Ritual

The ritual isn’t just the butterflies arriving. It’s the visceral anticipation that’s become me showing up witness it. For awe and wonder.

How much of culture is just this? Showing up at the same time, organized or not, because some pattern invites us. Not mandated. Just: this is when we’re here, discovering why we’re here. Letting that influence our solo and collective experiences and the work we do—maybe a little bit more than we do.

I don’t have all the answers here. Just awe. Just gratitude.

Just: this is home, this is the time, we arrive together.

I’m planting seeds to return to—exploring why we flock, gather, organize, and experience Wonder and Flow in collectives, small and large. Maybe it becomes a series. Maybe a book. For this instance, it’s just watching those cool kaleidoscopes and asking: what can they teach us about belonging?

I saw a LinkedIn post in my feed earlier this week that super triggered my nervous system.

I’m paraphrasing here, but it was essentially “Your discomfort with how fast AI is moving is a good thing, I’m OK with that.”

I didn’t save that post, and I’m not here to call that author out or shame them. I think their intent may well have been to spark a learning and curiosity mindset, but I received it in my nervous system much differently — as more of the usual cortisol-spiking AI urgency that has become normalized in our current times.

I’m rejecting fake urgency in 2026.

It sent me into a rabbit hole 😅 — thinking about phrases we hear, that we’ve accepted as normal “strategy” mindsets, but that might be really [extractive] red flags dressed up as strategy. Maybe we take a deeper look at phrases like these and reframe them:

“If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing”

Starting with this one that sparked this whole rabbit hole and rant.

Look, on the other side of struggle can be Flow, and I'm a 100% supporter of learning, stretching, curiosity, exploration, and their kindred folk. We do atrophy and move ourselves further away from the impact we want to make if we’re not stretching our skills and abilities (stretching our challenge to skills by around 4% is a common recommendation for Flow).

But there's a difference between healthy stretching and treating discomfort as a productivity strategy. One builds skill. The other causes trauma.

What we might try instead: "Interesting things happen at the edges…at the edges of comfort, but not beyond capacity."

“Bias for action” | “Move Fast, Break Stuff” | “Always be shipping”

All three of these are related/similar that sound good, but are steeped in urgency culture. They all default to one state — “always be doing.”

It’s a thing in our culture that rejects rest or fallow periods in our launches, projects, and processes. It’s an ailment that equates midstream reflection or planning as "stalling" and penalizes our people.

If everything is a 9 out of 10 on the urgency scale, or if we don’t build recovery periods into (or in between) projects or sprints, we end up with burned-out teams and systems held together by heroics instead of more intentional, compassionate design

Let’s replace these with: "Sustainable momentum over constant urgency."

“Let’s 10x/100x this thing”

Despite what the billionaires and tech bro snake oil salesmen are selling, exponential growth isn’t a thing. Neither is exponential profit. Systems are cyclical. They atrophy. Sustainable growth works within the means of the system and its resources.

This isn’t to confuse scale with big hairy goals of bringing something to the world that helps loads of people or fixing bigger Earth problems like Climate Change, food insecurity, etc.

Big impact doesn’t necessarily require exponential growth of our work systems. Small and mighty teams working inside right-sized, sustainable systems can make a huge difference at scale. This is a place where I love the potential of AI to scale operations to help us serve the greater good.

What might land better: “Right-sized growth that matches our capacity and resources.”

“Act like an owner”

I know we like to equate “owner” with accountability, but it’s a squishy term. If your company culture is really built on values like continuous learning, mentoring, and equal participation and equity from all team members…if your goals and impact are clear, and everyone buys into it, wonderful. High fives.

Otherwise, “owner” can just be a thinly veiled expectation of unlimited responsibility without authority or equity (or compensation!) to match.

Let’s replace this with: “Act like a Steward,” which has a more inclusive “We” intention.

“Work smarter, not harder”

I have this adage in two places, here and below, in a short list of phrases I think are actually sound strategic mindsets. In this case, we want to be wary that leadership isn’t masking chronic understaffing and resource scarcity by design.

Of course, AI is getting better and better at supporting and resourcing (or scaling) smaller teams, operationally speaking. But we need guardrails to make sure it’s not a yes/and scenario, where employers stay chronically understaffed, and adding AI to your stack is just another job requirement heaped on team members who might already be spread too thin.

Reframe it in this instance as: "Work sustainably—tools and AI should reduce load, not add to it."

Three Phrases I Love (With the Right Context)

• “Fail fast and learn” - I actually like this. I’m a 3/5 Emotional Generator profile in Human Design, which is all about experimenting and bringing those findings to the bigger collective. I’m all for everyone having the space and permission (from yourself and your employer) to do the same in healthy ways.

• “Published, not perfect” - I also love this, because I’m a chronic tinkerer. I’m getting better about it. 😂 I’m seeing more and more posts from folks at the start of 2026 advocating for just publishing or launching the thing. Being messy with it. Just doing it. Embracing the rogue typos that might sneak into our content. The things that affirm that we’re human, and being human is messy.

• “Work smarter, not harder” - This one gets double-billing, as I mentioned. When the phrase is a platitude that’s masking chronic under-resourcing, that’s causing stress in teams, bad. When it’s used intentionally and is about reducing cognitive load or friction, to support our people and mission, wonderful.

Look, I’m not naive enough to think a single article will shift how organizations operate. But maybe it plants a seed. Maybe it offers permission and new framing for things that have been bothering us about our workplace cultures and practices.

Phrases we’ve all accepted sound strategic because they’re dressed up in the language of ambition, excellence, and high performance. But maybe they’re optimizing for short-term output over long-term capacity. They’re asking people to give more than the system gives back.

So here’s what I’m proposing: Start noticing when these phrases show up in your organization. Ask yourself—is this actually strategy, or is this extraction dressed up to sound good? And then, when you have the authority to do so, start replacing them with language that builds capacity instead of depleting it.

Hola! I’m Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofits build regenerative business operations and project systems that breathe—so your team can focus on the work that matters instead of fighting broken systems.

If your operations feel overwhelming, your team is burned out, or you’re holding too many bags, let’s chat! DM me or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat.

The thing about the awesome tools out there designed to support and scale to our projects and workflows: they give you so many options that you run into more chaos than you bargained for, before you even get started. That tool you just bought has so many bells and whistles, and you need maybe 5 of those out of the box. But which ones?

In Part 1 of this series, I focused more on foundation ingredients I love for calmer, more regenerative systems and projects that feel good to work in.

In this edition, I’m getting tool-specific. I work primarily in ClickUp and Asana with small businesses, nonprofits, and associations, but these principles apply broadly to whatever collaborative work management platform you’re using.

The goal isn’t to use every feature. It’s to build a tool that scales with how your team actually works.

Start With Good Hierarchy Hygiene

Understanding how your tool structures work is foundational. It’s your scaffolding for setting up work and projects that you don’t have to think about. Every platform has its own approach to hierarchy.

In ClickUp, you’ve got Workspaces, Spaces, Folders, Lists, Tasks, and Subtasks to work with. In Asana, it’s Organizations, Teams, Projects, Sections, Tasks, and Subtasks. Other tools have their own versions.

The key isn’t to avoid using these levels—it’s to use them intentionally based on how your team actually works.

The mistake I see most? Adding hierarchy layers without a clear reason, or because the tool lets you, not because you need to.

For a small nonprofit or association: Spaces for departments, Folders for projects, Lists for workstreams. That’s reasonable, if your org actually operates that way. A team of 12 with five nested levels? That’s friction..

The sweet spot: Match your team’s mental model. For most small teams, that’s 3–4 levels max.

Subtasks vs. Checklists

Both are great features for chunking bigger tasks into bite-sized micro-actions that give clarity to the To Do list of the day and reduce decision fatigue. Most platforms offer both—here’s when to use which.

Subtasks are for work that needs visibility, tracking, or its own assignee. Think: deliverables that impact timelines or need status updates. Subtasks, like tasks, are often assigned to someone, have deadlines attached to them.

Checklists are for quick, non-critical steps that live inside one person’s workflow. Light, quick reference SOPs for your team. Think: “Draft email. Get approval. Send.”

One possible trap? Treating every step like it needs to be a subtask. That can create noise—dozens of tiny tasks cluttering views, dashboards, and inboxes.

Try This: Before you create a subtask, ask: “Does this need to show up in someone’s task list, or is it just a reminder for the person doing the main task?” If it’s the latter, make it a checklist item instead.

Automations are Awesome But ≠ Stress-Free

Automations can save you—if they’re solving a real, recurring problem. But they also add cognitive load: maintenance, debugging, and remembering what’s automated in the first place.

A decision tree before you automate:

• Is this task truly repetitive? (If no, skip it.)

• Does it happen at least weekly? (If no, probably not worth automating.)

• Can you explain the logic in one sentence? (If no, it’s too complex—don’t do it.)

Before you automate anything, I usually advise running the workflow manually a few times. Watch how it actually behaves in real conditions with real tasks and real people. Measure twice, cut once.

This doesn’t replace the need to test automations before rolling them out org-wide—but it helps you catch logic gaps before you’ve committed to the automation in the first place.

Try This: Start with 1–2 automations max. Let them run for a month. See if they actually reduce friction or just create a different kind of maintenance burden. Then decide if you want more.

Too Many Custom Fields? Cough, Cough

Custom fields are wonderful for personalizing your projects and systems to how you work best. They’re seductive because most of the tools let you create an endless assortment of them to help you customize the tool to your project and work.

But just because you can add custom fields doesn’t mean you should. Priority, Status, Department, Budget, Phase, Campaign, Quarter—before you know it, every task has a dozen dropdown menus.

I’m going through this with a client now. We built the first version of their ClickUp system with way too many custom fields, which was a great exercise to pause, evaluate, and decide what fields were essential for team workflows and client visibility

Every field is a micro-decision. And every micro-decision drains energy. If your team is skipping fields or filling them out inconsistently, that’s a signal. The system’s asking too much.

Try This: Limit custom fields to maybe 5–7 per project or project list. If your team is skipping fields or filling them inconsistently, pare back. Keep only what’s essential for workflow and visibility.

Keep Dashboards Focused

Dashboards are one of the best features in collaborative work management tools. They help you see, at a glance, what’s on deck, what’s blocked, and where attention is needed. Most tools also let individual users create personalized dashboards to track their own work.

The trap: building with too many things right out of the gate. Twelve cards, seventeen filters, five chart types. You’re drowning in data instead of seeing what matters.

The principle: Start lean. A good dashboard can absolutely show you “what’s due this week” and “what’s blocked” in the same view—but it should do so clearly, without cognitive overload.

Try This:

• Limit your dashboard to 3–5 cards max when you’re first building it. You can always add more later.

• Create an SOP for dashboard structure—what goes in a team-wide project dashboard vs. a personal one? What types of cards are most useful? What’s overkill?

• Audit your dashboards regularly. If a card hasn’t been looked at in a month, delete it.

Good dashboards give you the signal without too much noise. If you’re squinting or scrolling to figure out what you’re looking at, simplify.

If Your System Feels Heavy, It’s Not Helping You

Here’s the thing: a tool that demands constant attention isn’t a tool—it’s another job.

The systems that work well and breathe, and feel good to work in? They support your work without demanding translation. They breathe with your team instead of suffocating them with options.

You don’t need to use every feature. You need to use the right features for how your brain and your team actually work.

Start simple. Let it scale. Audit regularly—systems drift. What worked six months ago might not work now. Check in quarterly. Prune what doesn’t serve you. Add what you need.

The fanciest setup is useless if it stresses people. A system that grows with you? That’s the brass ring.

If you’re running a small business, nonprofit, or association and your tools are starting to feel more like the problem instead of the solution—or if you’re building something new and want to avoid these traps—I’m here for that.

DM me to book a free, no-strings Unjammed Ops Audit Session or visit me at bearfuht.com. You’ll walk away with at least one friction-reducing insight, whether we work together or not.

Happy 2026, Gregorian calendar lovers and planners!

I’m coming out of a favorite annual ritual I get to do with Ixchel — 13 Mystical/Magical Nights. I’m planning a separate reflection piece about that, but in a nutshell, I wrote down 13 intentions/wishes for 2026 — in a journal and on slips of paper. Since Winter Solstice, I’ve been burning one of those slips of paper to release the intention to the Universe. 12 Magical Nights, 12 intentions cast into smoke for the Universe to carry. Tomorrow, Jan 2, I’ll get to look at the 13th wish, which is mine to work on and manifest.

That’s one ritual I look forward to every year, with so much reverence.

The second one is ’s #My3Words challenge, which he’s been doing since 2006 — in which we pick three words to be lodestars for our creative, professional, and community work in the new year.

Reflecting on my 3 Words for 2025 and how they showed up for me this year…

Gallup: As in Simon, badass bass player for The Cure (vs. the polling company of the same name 😉). Simon has such a deep, signature tone and style that I fucking love. Gallup, as a lodestar for me, was about stepping more into my me-ness this year. Being more visible.

I think I did a decent job of that, algorithms be damned. I even convinced myself to fire up my dormant TikTok account and get on video here at the close of the year. It was probably the word that I met with the most resistance, but I’m introverted and skew toward being more socially awkward than not. I’ll take the showing up Wins.

Aperture: This was about widening perspectives in 2025, my own and for others, directly or indirectly. New ways of seeing and being. More than a dozen tech events produced this year contributed to that. But I also published more and tried to be useful and novel. But also writing and publishing more. Showing up, supporting, and sharing across LinkedIn, Bluesky (for photography), and Threads.

Aperture was also a commitment to a photography habit and practice, purely for cup-filling joy. A thing I practiced, with some fallow periods of retrograde. But I’ve renewed my devotion for 2026 by setting a Big Hairy Goal to become a serious practicing photographer.

Mycelial: Being a resource, a bridge, a connector. Bringing people together is the work and reward of event production, so check, check, and check in many ways. As 2025 got more and more dysfunctional, as I witnessed more small business owners, creators, and freelancers in states of stress from having to do everything alone, my curiosity toward collective work has really grown. The Mycelial for the new year that’s showing up in my 3 Words for 2026

I felt way more connected to these all year. I was more intentional about weaving them into my seasonal/lunar and weekly planning sessions, and these lodestar words felt purposeful and connected.

I like my word choices to be novel enough to keep me interested enough to use them as anchor points throughout the year. They’re personal to me, and I honestly don’t spend a lot of time sharing them with others (other than here as part of the ritual). So it’s OK if they feel a little esoteric to the outside observer.

These are mine for 2026 (for the Winter Solstice-to-Winter Solstice period) that I’m pretty stoked have surfaced for me as lodestar words for next year:

Quest

2026 is my Year of Yes. More surrender, curiosity, adventure, learning, and collaboration. More Flow. More deepening into our Mexico life and relationships with our neighbors and the greater community. Striving to treat every day as a Choose Your Own Adventure wherever I can. I think I understand the assignment, and I’m here for it.

This is also a nod to Questlove, whom I revere for his brilliant gifts of music knowledge and curation. A year of Quest and discovery needs a bigger soundtrack. I’m committing at least half of my listening time to new artists and new genres outside of my usual post-punk / shoegaze / swampy / prog rock / metal / trip hop / downtempo lanes. I want to learn from Questlove and how he hears and curates music, and get really good at that myself, for funsies.

Collectivo

2026 is primed to be the year of collectivism. The year of We. It’s the thing that I’m planning to spend most of my focus on this year. By the end of 2025, the number of social posts I saw from entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, artists, and freelancers in a state of stress and exhaustion was heartbreaking. All mirroring some Sisyphus version of being isolated, doing their thing alone, dealing with ridiculous headwinds from a shitty, broken system.

We don’t have to do it alone. We shouldn’t have to, anyway. Here in Mexico, there are collectives of taxistas, agriculture/growers, manufacturing, etc. But the collectivo spirit also shows up in things like a shared retail space, occupied by several different small, independent businesses, and it works.

Let’s let 2026 be a year where we come together in weird, unexpected collectives to support each other’s success in business and life, grounded in systems of mutual aid and reciprocity. It’s the medicine we need when it’s a handful of yt men at the controls of our systems.

Provecho

One of my favorite living practices that people do in Mexico is to say “Buen Provecho” when you enter or leave a restaurant or cafe. (‘Provecho’ is the casual variation and adheres to Chris’s ‘rules’ for these 3 Words 😂)

That can be something as simple as a cup of coffee (Coatepec has amazing coffee), or a full, fancy meal.

How natural, generous, and wonderful an ecstatic it is, to show a simple kindness to another human — that you’re psyched for them that they’re about to enjoy a really good cafecito or meal. It’s a generous wishing for someone else’s pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment.

It’s a mantra and blessing I’m carrying into 2026, literally and metaphorically speaking.

These are feeling LIT. Thanks to Chris for planting this ritual in my practice so many years ago. Here’s to a JOYFUL, hopeful, buoyant 2026 for each of us!

Hola! If you’re new here, I’m Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofits build regenerative business operations and project systems that breathe—so your team can focus on the work that matters instead of fighting broken systems.

If your operations feel overwhelming, your team is burned out, or you’re holding too many bags, let’s chat! DM me or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat.

The full-time event production world I semi-retired from in October (2025) might be one of the most fluid and demanding work environments there is. Not to compare—we’re not saving lives here. But the complexity and pace of events? Wild.

Events are a lot like kitchens, in a lot of ways. Lots of creativity. Defined stations and roles. But fluidity and Flow as connective tissue.

I’m a huge fan of The Bear — especially how well it weaves themes of collaboration and “everyone does every job.” The tension between specialists and generalists. It feels very kindred to my event producer career every time I catch the show.

Igualmente with the storytelling in Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality, where he chronicles how Eleven Madison Park became the top-rated restaurant in the U.S. by creating a culture where everyone was responsible for the guest experience, no matter their job title.

For smaller or more resource-constrained teams, being able to slide between specialist and generalist — and thrive in the liminal space between those roles — is everything.

We Need Specialists. But We Need Generalists.

In large organizations, hyper-specialization can work. There’s time, money, and structure to support it (though I’d still argue that Generalists are vital ingredients for fostering Group Flow in big companies too).

But in small, mission-driven teams or resource-challenged orgs, having those rigid roles is often a luxury — and it can lead to breakdowns. Maybe it’s a team getting stuck waiting on a single gatekeeper. Or someone saying, “That’s not my job,” when what’s really needed is, “How can I help?”

Generalists aren’t just nice to have. In teams, they’re really good at keeping things keep moving. They bring curiosity, range, and instinct to fill in gaps instead of tiptoeing around them.

An effictive team needs people who understand the value of both range and rhythm—and developing a culture that embraces the skill of knowing when to flex and when to focus. It’s the soil and connective tissue that create consistently high-flow teams.

It’s the loom we all need to work with more in 2026, IMO.

Specialized Generalists Nurture More Group Flow

There, I said it. I’m an unabashed Generalist fanboy and advocate. The thing that I might get praised for the most as a leader of distributed event teams over my career is the talent to transmute chaos into calm. That’s not necessarily a generalist superpower, but it’s not not that.

When teams are made up of fluid generalists with deep specialties, they’re uniquely equipped to experience—and sustain—high-performance group flow. They listen closely, adapt quickly, shift between roles, and stay attuned to the overall rhythm of the work.

They can satisfy the key conditions—like a collective sense of purpose, psychological safety, and responsive collaboration—not by trying to do everything, but by staying aware of what the team needs moment to moment.

And just like in the back of house, front of house, and the interplay between two in The Bear, it works because everyone knows their station and their purpose, but are flexible to support each other when the ish hits the fan.

They move together, improvise when they have to, and always serve the collective, shared goals (Group Flow trigger!). The dish gets plated. The guest gets served. The night keeps moving.

That kind of flow comes from trust, awareness, and practice.

So What Now?

So how do you build a team that moves like this—fluid, focused, and always ready to shift when it counts?

It starts with intention, seeded across the systems and culture of the organization itself. High-flow teams are built in environments that support them—where structure is regenerative, not restrictive. Where the org design, rituals, and rhythms allow people to move between roles without friction or fear.

• Start by creating systems that encourage, nurture, and mentor skill overlap. Let people shadow each other. Host cross-training sessions. Not everything needs to be formal. Even casual “show me how you do that” moments matter.

• Make it safe for anyone to step in. No one wants to overstep or be the try-hard. Create an environment where jumping in is appreciated, not punished.

• Actively recognize adaptability. We’re good at rewarding deep expertise. We’re less good at noticing who filled the awkward gap in a meeting or quietly picked up the unsexy task that kept everything on track. Celebrate that.

• Balance clarity with flexibility. People need to know what they’re responsible for. But they also need to know they can stretch beyond it when needed.

When “everyone does every job” becomes a mindset—not a logistical nightmare—you unlock something deeper than efficiency. You create conditions for trust, adaptability, and flow.

Not everyone has to be good at everything. But everyone should feel empowered to show up for the work in front of them—even when it stretches them. Especially when it matters.

What’s one way you could step outside your defined role this week—to strengthen the whole team?

Hola! Im Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofits build regenerative business operations and project systems that breathe—so your team can focus on the work that matters instead of fighting broken systems.

If your operations feel overwhelming, your team is burned out, or you’re the bottleneck on everything, let’s talk. DM me or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat.

I have a wonderful client who runs a smaller design and marketing agency. She has a network of freelancers who pop in and out of client projects, but a lot of the business still sits on her shoulders (small business owners and solopreneurs…IYKYK).

She reached a point of saturation in her business that might sound too familiar to you — a clear vision for the growth of the agency mixed with the overwhelm of wearing too many hats.

So she naturally shopped for tools to help with her growth from a Basecamp + Pandadocs + Email + bespoke client care menagerie.

She got ClickUp as her future project management tool

And added HubSpot to be her CRM.

Helpful tools? Yes, of course! But when you’re already wearing too many hats in your business, more (new) tools can = more overwhelm.

She paid a tidy sum for a consultant to help with Hubspot…who ghosted her. The burden of learning both platforms alone? Too much. Cue the freeze state.

My highest purpose with clients and collabs is always to bring calm and clarity into chaotic, overstretched work.

There are simple things any small business or org leader can do to dissolve operational overwhelm before it takes root — so you can stay focused on your vision and the work that feeds you.

I’m dividing this article into two parts to help chunk down the checklist I use with clients. This part is more org and tool foundational.

(Disclaimer: I work with events, agencies, nonprofits, and small businesses with projects of all sizes or products and services to sell. BUT, if your system is more technical, more scientific, these tips might speak to you, but might not. I’m not all things for all people. 😁)

Ask for help

That’s Thing #1. We don’t do enough of it in today’s extractive work cultures. High fives to my client, and to any founder who spots the signs of overload and asks for help. Even if it’s just fractional support or a one-hour jam sesh with a peer who can help you see more clearly? Huge.

I ask 2 questions before any system or project build

For the client: “What has to be true in this system for it to still work and feel good in six months or a year?”

For myself: “What has to be true in this project for me to deliver my best work and feel good doing it?”

The first anchors vision, scope, and energy. The second ensures I stay resourced and relational.

In both cases, it’s important in more regeneratively-designed structures to NOT ignore the somatics of our work, and for the work we do (and the systems we do them in) to feel invigorating.

A Few Easy Antidotes

IMO these map equally well to most any project tool that brings better scaffolding and structure to your growth — but can also apply to an org’s overall structure and DNA:

You don’t need to use the whole tool, all at once

Write this down and anchor it. Most tools have a ton of features and are designed to scale with you.

You don’t have to use them all at once.

Just need a basic project setup without automations, tons of dependencies? Perfect. Not ready to use the AI Copilot or agent now embedded in the tool? Totally OK.

Try This: Always start with a sketch of the scope of maybe 3-5 structural things you do need before you jump into the tool, to dissolve feature overwhelm before it starts. Use that as your friction filter as you dive into tool adoption or organizational changes.

Too Many Layers of Complexity = Flow breakdown

Related, if you launch your “system” with too many features or bells & whistles and unleash it on your team, it can be a recipe for friction and breakdowns in your daily Flow — individually and as a team.

A new tool should support the way you and your team already do your best work.

Zooming out, the same goes for your org structure. Too many reporting lines, approval gates, or unclear areas of ownership? Same outcome. Flow gets disrupted. Simpler structures invite more natural accountability and ease. Let your systems scale with you.

No Standard Naming Conventions = Search that feels ‘Oof’

This is a more tool-specific tip, but whether it’s a project tool or your Google or Teams workspace, having an SOP about naming conventions will go a long way toward preventing operational madness. Without those, you can end up with 47 versions of the same thing, and no one can find what they need.

Try This: Pick 3-4 naming patterns your team uses often and create a short reference doc. Make sure everyone knows where that SOP lives and is on the same page. It doesn’t need to be fancy. Bonus points if you later build it directly into dropdowns or task templates.

Too many things assigned to “teams” instead of people

It’s obviously important for your team (or a subgroup working on a specific project) to have access and visibility to things. It’s not (in my experience) a great idea to make everyone the owner of every task.

Do This: Make one person accountable for a given task or set of tasks as your practice. You can always add other team members as “task watchers” or collaborators, but only assign one person responsible for delivery.

No Clear Status Updates = Work in limbo

Whether as a visual Status change in your project tool or as a consistent communication practice in your company or organization, this is vital.

Try This: Commit to regular updates and async-friendly status check-ins. The goal isn’t just to mark tasks “done,” but to keep everyone in the loop about what’s in motion, what’s stalled, and what needs support.

If your project or biz ops systems feel heavy or unclear, it doesn’t mean you are broken. It means your systems might need some zhuzhing, or an overhaul.

Let’s fix that.

If you’re stuck on overwhelm or are just seeing too much friction coming down the road soon — and you want a fresh set of eyes, I’m here for that.

Book a free Discovery Call at bearfuht.com and let’s see what’s ailing you. You’ll walk away with at least one useful solution to ease your friction, whether we work together or not.

I’ve sat down to write this reflection on resistance and our my relationship with it, probably six times now. On at least a couple of instances, I tapped out to go on wonderful and necessary wanders in Xalapa and Coatepec with Ixchel (because I’m very spontaneously suggestible like that 🤣).

There was a Mars square Saturn thing happening for a minute (action and focus, meet slow and methodical. Those tensions can let all kinds of shiny things in to distract me).

And then just me getting in my own way and bouncing out of the struggle phase of Flow instead of leaning into it. My own shit — usually some kind of cocktail of boredom, fuzzy focus, “should be doing this other thing (all the shoulds…sigh),” and feelings of low self-worth.

We all have moments (or achingly long periods) of resistance to things. And 2025 has given us a lot of reasons to put up walls and resist the fuck out of everything as protection or a coping mechanism.

It’s a relationship I’m continuing to deepen into — the surface symptoms and the deeper, shadowy sides of when I resist things, why I resist, and when/how resistance is useful/healthful, and when it’s not. It’s the medicine I need in this next chapter of life. I’m thinking about resistance most often through these lenses right now:

Resistance as Protection

We all throw up boundaries of resistance to protect ourselves, in times of danger (real or perceived), freeze, and flee.

I’m pretty Saturnian, by design and by nature. I’m introverted. I like structure and routine. My Saturn-Venus-Mercury stellium in my 8th house primes me for being able to transmute chaos into calm for others. It’s a thing I’ve built a reputation around.

There’s also a selfish reason for loving Saturnian things. For me, there’s an inherent feeling of safety in routine, a balm for when I don’t necessarily feel safe — in the face of whatever external circumstances might be happening. Maybe you can relate.

The truth is, even in my mid-50s, as an able-bodied, yt-cis-presenting dude, I’ve struggled with feeling safe consistently for most of my life. So routine and structure are Linus’s blankets I can return to, to “feel safer.”

I’ve learned to recognize the signs in my body when I don’t. A tightening in my solar plexus. Constriction in my heart center or throat. When things feel most chaotic, it’s the baseline daily routines I can come back to for safety. I can feel tense as fuck and stop to wash dishes in the kitchen…and get an almost instant softening of the body and relief.

But I can be very Gemini and live in the extremes of dichotomies. There are two nasty effects of my overdoing it and overindulging in my devotion to structure and routine.

First, too much resistance-manifested-as-rigidity keeps me small, and a smaller version of me is not as useful to impact I yearn to contribute to the world.

Second, when I indulge those routines to a fault, it’s usually at the expense of my family or my work. I get too rigid to the point where the tighening in my body makes it more difficult to accept what is, in the present now.

You probably have your own version of Resistance = Protection. Structure and routine certainly aren’t the only manifestations of it for me. But they’re the ones I’ve been witnessing and healing most often lately.

Resistance as Information

I just ended a full-time contract with an event client in October. Someone I’ve worked with before, have known for years, and who I worked with for the last 4 1/2 years. Nodding back to the themes of routine and safety, it was a regular, reliable income and resources for my family, even as a 1099 contract position.

To be honest, I’ve been blessed since I made the move to 1099 work more than 12 years ago, to basically have one full-time event “client” after another, giving us regular, reliable income.

But, probably the last two years of the gig were challenging. At that point (call it 2023), I’d been in the full-time event production business for 15+ years — 17+ by the time this contract wrapped up.

And — admission of truth — the pace and stress of full-time event organizing moved more easily through my body when I was 40 than it does now in my early-mid 50s.

Some of that is that it’s just gotten way more challenging for independent event producers. But a lot of it has just been cumulative fatigue.

So there was a natural atrophy that was already happening in the relationship with my chosen career, one that has brought me so much joy and stability for my family. And there was a point, by relationship, where I stopped really having any fun in that last gig, and it was just about the paycheck. I still showed up every day, but with resistance in my body, most every day. I knew it, and my client and friend knew it. We parted ways, amicably, and with much love.

(It’s probably a move I should have made two years prior, and I think I’ve learned from my last two long-term contract gigs that ~3 years might be my max capacity for a given engagement.)

Resistance can show up in our bodies when we’re at our expiration date with something. When there’s a thing — a project, a job, a relationship, whatever — that’s naturally waned. I think our job is to listen to that. It’s information. Sometimes making the jump is scary, but ultimately what we need to feel renewed and vital again. It’s not always information I’ve done a good job listening to, but I’m working on it.

Resistance as Liberation

Fast-forward to today (December 28, as I’m writing this). I’m now without a regular full-time gig for the past few weeks and have pivoted to full-time biz ops and project consulting / fractional work. Focusing on purpose-driven, growing SMBs and nonprofits. Taking the pieces of event work that I still love dearly and am good at, and putting them to use for making an impact in the world

For the first time, really ever, I’m in the driver’s seat of being responsible for finding a regular stream of clients. That’s been both wildly liberating and has really triggered all of my base safety alarm bells. It’s different muscles I’m learning to develop.

This liminal space has NOT been comfortable. I keep titrating between “keep going” and “fuck it, go find another FT job.” There’s resistance in my body looking down either path. So I’m yes/and-ing it for now. Build the consultancy. Be open to a singular FT role that will resource us and bring us ease.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. Bread crumbs of purpose.

I’ve witnessed way too many people this year — creators, solopreneurs, small, independent business owners, in particular, but also women, communities of color, and LGBTQIA+ — in states of trauma and stress because they feel alone. Because they are doing their thing all alone. Because the 2025 shit sandwich has stacked the deck against us all.

We don’t need to do it alone.

We can — and probably should — work in the cooperative, in the collective, more in 2026. This year has taught us that we should be forming mycelial networks between our small businesses. We saw tons of it in social media (for me, witnessing it in Threads) — small business owners turning out and amplifying each other. We can turn that energy into containers of mutual support for each other.

That’s a thing that shines light for me, that steers me back toward the path of scary entrepreneurship — even as my body tension stress levels are at an all-time high, in the absence of booked work for January and shrinking bank accounts.

Resistance as Rescue

I’m treating 2026 as a Year of Yes. I rely so much on comfort and safety inside my own structure that I stop living, and I get cranky.

There’s an analogy I love to live by here in Mexico (and in Nicaragua before that), and that is “if you’re waiting for there to be zero rain, you’ll never start living.” One way we experience the seasons is in terms of dry vs. wet. When it’s the thick of wet season, it’s…wet.

And when the heavier rains come, people pause their work, their errands, their goings on. They shelter. And when the rain lightens, everything resumes. But no one stops completely just because of the rain. If you wait for there to be zero rain during the rainy season to do anything, you’ll be pretty bummed for half the year.

There are no perfect conditions to do anything, really, including dancing with the things we resist.

So I’m leaning into saying Yes to more things, to getting uncomfortable, to surrender. Four things in particular that are pulling on me at a sacral level in 2026, which are also scary and uncomfortable as fuck in my body.

• Getting on video, fully in 2026. I’m introverted, socially awkward, and self-conscious as all get out. But I know the algo game prefers visual content, so off I go. I’ve already dipped into posting a few things this year, then went retrograde, and now I’m back at it.

• Learning how to become a better, committed entrepreneur and growing my consultancy, Bearfuht Labs, into its full being. Building and supporting human-centered, regenerative biz ops and project systems for/with SMBs and nonprofits. Making impact.

• As an extension (or orbiting planet) of that, initiating small collectivos of founders and freelancers, grounded in mutual reciprocity. Using privilege to help spark containers of collective care, collaboration, and prosperity for more people.

• Launching a podcast that explores how we deal with change and resistance, and creative and flow habits. Getting to surface others’ stories at these intersections, and also as a tool to deepen into and befriend my own relationship with resistance.

Scary, yes. But the good kind of scary - the kind that heals resistance to being seen, that practices self-love, that treats creativity and curiosity as essential instead of nice-to-have.

Here’s to 2026 as the year we befriend what we resist, and do massive things for ourselves and the collective on the other side. Thanks for listening!

Hola! Im Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofits build regenerative business operations and project systems that breathe—so your team can focus on the work that matters instead of fighting broken systems.

If your operations feel overwhelming, your team is burned out, or you’re the bottleneck on everything, let’s talk. DM me or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat.

A couple of years back, I worked briefly with a mission-driven media company—one that sold and centered transformation-focused events and products. Their project systems were beautifully designed in Asana, but their operations were surprisingly extractive. So many meetings — sometimes 5-6 hours per day, on top of the work they expected you to do (which was supposed to be managed from inside their Asana systems!)

It was a weird (but not uncommon) dichotomy: a devoted team of awesome impact-focused people, committed to the vision and core intentions of the company, but also visibly drained by unsustainable routines. I can’t tell you if it was purely a leadership problem or what, but I was more often exhausted than energized on most days.

I’m enamored with regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and natural systems—not just as metaphors, but as blueprints for how we can build smarter operations. These ideas shape how I work—and how I support growing SMBs and Nonprofits that are my mission to serve.

The Myth of Operational Efficiency

Many companies still treat operations like a conveyor belt. Push more through. Eliminate friction. Keep the line moving. Success gets measured in motion: faster timelines, more launches, fewer blockers. But people aren’t machines. And constant motion isn’t the same as real momentum.

This logic might work for predictable systems and product lines. But applied to creative, collaborative teams? It creates operational drag. Burnout rises. Quality drops. Teams lose momentum—and worse, trust. The very things businesses rely on to innovate and deliver start breaking down from the inside.

What if we measured resilience instead of velocity? What if we stopped rewarding systems that burn out the people they rely on?

From Extraction to Regeneration

Too many systems today are built to extract. Extract time. Extract energy. Extract deliverables. Even companies with the most noble of mission statements.

A regenerative approach doesn’t just ask how we can get more done—it asks how we can design work in ways that replenish energy, reinforce clarity, and build capacity over time.

In practice, this means pacing projects to include recovery time. It means documenting systems in a way that supports autonomy and reduces rework. It means teams get space to respond to real conditions—not just sprint toward deadlines.

Regenerative operations flex with and support the humans doing the work inside of those systems. They are containers that support how each team member is able to deliver their best work. They’re cyclical, circular, and reflective. They leave room to adjust when feedback or complexity enters the mix.

This isn’t a new idea. We can credit a more regenerative approach to our systems and project frameworks to Indigenous communities who have been practicing them for millennia, or to our natural systems that have been modeling for us for much, much longer (predating humans).

Regenerative Practices in Action—In our Businesses and Projects

Regenerative operations don’t require abandoning your deadlines or rewriting your roadmap. They ask you to build breathing room into the way you work.

Maybe you build in a decompression sprint after a launch, giving your team space to reset before shifting into the next phase.

Maybe you shift your weekly stand-ups to async during dense production periods, reducing meeting fatigue while tracking progress.

Maybe you treat your SOPs like living systems—pairing process docs with Loom walkthroughs or in-context instructions in Asana or ClickUp, so new collaborators don’t waste time guessing how things work.

In other words…small shifts in how teams plan, communicate, and recover can unlock more than just efficiency—they restore the conditions for sustainable, meaningful work.

If We Don’t Shift

Extractive systems don’t collapse overnight. They erode gradually, wearing people down until burnout turns into attrition, trust dissolves, and no one remembers what the original purpose was. Over time, urgency becomes the default. Recovery gets deprioritized. And the system quietly breaks beneath the surface.

After the oppressive year that so many have had in 2025, we need to nurture more resilience in our people and our systems in 2026. To shift toward something toward that, we need to build for pace, feedback, and capacity—and, yes, throughput and measurable growth, but not at the sake of our nervous systems. That means getting honest about the systems we’ve inherited and choosing to work in ways that support longevity, not just performance.

It’s not enough to move faster. It’s time to move differently. It’s the thing I’m putting most all of my time and energy into in the new year. If you’re thinking about how your operations could evolve, I’d love to chat!

Hola! Im Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofits build regenerative business operations and project systems that breathe—so your team can focus on the work that matters instead of fighting broken systems.

If your operations feel overwhelming, your team is burned out, or you’re the bottleneck on everything, let’s talk. DM me or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat.

I love a good Zócalo wander, in every place we’ve lived in LATAM so far.

Día de Muertos was a couple of weeks ago (at the time of my writing this), and our Zócalo here in Coatepec was LIT — vibrant with streams of papel picado and giant paper maché Catrinas, beckoning people into its center for play, or rest, or for a really good bag of churros.

I was out for errands, and I always try to traverse our zócalo anyway when I’m crisscrossing to all the surrounding places “on my list,” because it breathes calm and gratitude into me with each pass through.

But it’s also divine to just sit and witness. So I did, and gratitude for the opportunity to be here flowed into me.

Most any zócalo is so much cooler and deeper as a living system if you get to know it as an organism, vs. just as a “Place to Visit” you found on TripAdvisor.

(Disclaimer: the thoughts and ideas to follow are 100% based on my personal experience of Zócalo culture, where we’ve lived, and not the lived experience of the people of Nicaragua, Oaxaca, Chiapas, or Veracruz who’ve been here their whole lives. Nor am I claiming this piece comes from a place of immersion as deep as I’d like yet. Poco a poco.)

Zócalo = A System That Breathes

If you’ve never been to one, a zócalo is the cultural and social heart you can find in most any town or city throughout LATAM. Common features include:

• A central park with a gazebo, fountain, or statue

• Hub-and-spoke design with nature protected between the spokes

• An adjacent plaza where good things happen — artisan fairs, music, demonstrations, Pride celebrations

• Usually next to a large church or municipal building (or in Coatepec’s case, both)

• SO many sit spots and space for pop-up musicians or kids to play

• Vendors selling goodness — daily coffee carts, seasonal artisan stands

When I’m running errands in Centro, I usually orient myself relative to it (”The mercado is 2 blocks this way… the Coffee Museum is 3 longer blocks that way, from the park.”).

But the Zócalo is so much more than the sum of its physical parts. It’s a living system that is:

• Relational — people know each other, return to the same vendors, and build trust over time

• Multi-generational — LATAM is more relational by nature than the U.S., so it’s joyful to see generations in connection with each other in the zócalo as a normal thing

• A place of both rest and activity — in beautiful tension with each other. You can be active or passive. Both are welcome.

• Transitory by design — sometimes packed with festivals and energy, sometimes quiet. Ebbs and flows that are both “planned” and organic.

The more time I’m gifted in these spaces, the more I’ve come to see them as a blueprint and balm for our times. In a time when fewer people own more, when we’re more fragmented as people in societal and work systems that don’t sustain us, the zócalo offers a model for designing systems with more coherence and breath.

Pattern in Practice

We’re stuck in systems designed for extraction and endless growth. Scale or fail. Compete by eliminating. But what if we designed for sufficiency, reciprocity, and collective resilience instead? What if we organized work — both our structures AND our systems — more like a zócalo?

When I say “systems,” I mean the actual infrastructure of how work happens. Your project management setup. Communication rhythms. Decision-making processes. Org structures and culture. The tools and rituals that either support flow or create friction.

But I also mean the larger structures of how we organize work collectively. Who we work with. How we share resources. Whether we’re building cooperatively or in isolation.

The zócalo model offers lessons and breadcrumbs that work in both contexts:

Shared Infrastructure, Individual Autonomy

In the Zócalo, the plaza is a commons. But each vendor runs their own operation. Every zócalo also has some kind of center — sometimes a fountain, sometimes just the energetic heart. It orients you without controlling you.

In our work, this shows up at multiple scales. Fractional workers pooling resources — the skilled accountant, the liability insurance, the CRM platform. Small collectives sharing operational overhead while each running their own practice. And within teams, a visible center that orients without controlling — not a person who becomes the bottleneck, but a central “source of truth” everyone knows they can return to.

The center isn’t about hierarchy. It’s about coherence. When things get messy, what do people come back to?

It’s not about giving up independence. It’s asking: What am I building alone that would work better if shared?

Competition Without Extraction + Structure That Flexes

Zócalo vendors compete, but they’re not trying to monopolize. They show up, do their thing, make what they need, come back tomorrow (or next weekend… or next festival).

Some are there every day — the coffee cart anchors the system. Others pulse in seasonally — weekend artisans keep it alive.

When systems lean too heavily toward structure, they risk calcifying. When they’re all emergence, they risk fragmenting. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.

Places to Pause (Built In, Not Earned)

Benches under trees. Shade. Edges where you can sit and watch. The zócalo invites rest into its design. You don’t have to earn the bench.

Too many ways we work treat the pause as failure. What if rest was designed in from the start?

In cooperative structures, it’s the sabbatical that’s part of your model, not a privilege. In team systems, it’s protected async time. Recovery built into timelines.

Without rest built into the design, burnout becomes the baseline instead of the exception.

Multiple Ways to Participate

In a Zócalo, you can be the daily vendor, the weekend artisan, the person buying flowers, the elder on the bench, the musician, the protester. All valid. The system doesn’t demand you show up the same way every time.

Work systems often assume one mode: active contribution. Doing. Producing. Speaking up.

But healthy participation includes observing, integrating, supporting quietly, taking a back seat on this project to lead the next one, and asking questions instead of having answers.

Not everyone needs to be “always on.” Some people anchor. Some pulse in and out. Roles can shift without requiring job-hopping just to try something new.

Seasonality Is a Feature

Tuesday mornings in the zócalo might be quiet, but Saturday afternoons? Packed with a mix of activity and idling. Some months bring festivals. Some weeks are slower. It’s a rhythm that works.

Your work has rhythm, too. In cooperative models, this means building for sufficiency instead of endless growth.

What if “enough” was the goal? In team systems, it means honoring that some quarters are intense and some are quieter. Sprint seasons followed by recovery time that’s planned, not apologized for.

Designing for Joy, Abundance, Regeneration

The Zócalo isn’t just functional. It’s generative. People want to be there. It creates conditions for connection, discovery, commerce, rest, and play.

Most work systems are designed to extract productivity. Most business models are designed to scale at any cost. What would it look like to design both our collective structures AND our work systems for joy? For abundance instead of scarcity? For regeneration instead of depletion?

It means asking different questions.

Not “How do we maximize output?” but “How do we support sustainable contribution?”

Not “How do we eliminate downtime?” but “Where does rest live in this system?”

Not “How do we standardize *everything*?” but “Where is there room for emergence and experimentation?”

Not “How do we compete harder?” but “What could we share?”

A structure designed for abundance trusts that there’s enough time (if we’re honest about priorities), enough credit (we can share it), enough success (yours doesn’t diminish mine).

An Invitation

The zócalo offers a model where your success doesn’t require someone else’s failure. Where shared infrastructure doesn’t mean giving up autonomy. Where rest is designed in. Where relationships matter more than transactions.

It works at the scale of how we organize cooperatively with our peers. And at the scale of how we design systems within our teams.

So here’s what I’m inviting you to consider:

What if your work structure looked more like a plaza than a pyramid? What if you shared resources with peers instead of treating them as threats?

What if, as entrepreneurs, we banded together in a kajillion small collectivos of professionals with complementary things we’re doing or selling, where we support and elevate each other as a default intention?

Does your system breathe? Is there a visible center? Reliable rhythms? Room for emergence? Places to pause built in?

You don’t need permission or a complete overhaul. Just notice where the system supports breath and where it constricts. Then make one small shift toward coherence.

The work isn’t always to invent something entirely new. It’s noticing what cooperative infrastructure already exists — or could exist — and stop pretending we have to do everything alone.

Hola! Im Jaimey, founder of Bearfuht Labs. I love to help impact-focused SMBs and nonprofits build regenerative business operations and project systems that breathe—so your team can focus on the work that matters instead of fighting broken systems.

If your operations feel overwhelming, your team is burned out, or you’re the bottleneck on everything, let’s talk. DM me or visit bearfuht.com to book a free coffee chat.

I'm posting this Untethered Flow article on my birthday—not trolling for well wishes 😅 but birthdays and solar returns are natural points for inward reflection.

The last eight years of mine and Ixchel’s lives have been spent as guests and residents in LATAM. Eight years is a long time to be discovering that things you thought were just "how the world works" are just how one particular corner of the world works.

I’ve had a running LATAM gratitude and “growth” list going for a while, but I’ve been leaning more and more into the assumptions, behaviors, and deeply ingrained cultural programming I've had to shed along the way.

How We Got Here

Three years ago today, I was waking up in Antigua, Guatemala, midway through a 1,700-kilometer road trip to move myself, our German Shepherd Hugo, and a bunch of our shit to Oaxaca.

We were making the move from Nicaragua to Mexico—more residency options, zero dictators in power in Mexico. Ixchel had already flown ahead from Managua to Oaxaca (with a big assist from our youngest, Zee) and was waiting for us on the other side.

But our story starts earlier.

More than five years before that trek, Ixchel and I had decided to leave the U.S. We'd done our research and put Nicaragua at the top of our relocation wish list. In December 2016, we took a 3-week scouting trip to Matagalpa, Estelí, and Jinotega in the Northern Highlands.

I’ll never forget the drive from the Managua airport to Matagalpa, our first stop. In that two-hour ride, all of my white privilege came rushing into focus.

I grew up in suburban Northern California, so seeing cinder block homes with metal roofs (or more basic construction than that), people doing laundry outside by hand, and burning trash in the yard, that was…new.

And it marked the beginning of a long, humbling process of unlearning.

I’ve been hyper aware of what it means to be a 6'2" Gen X gringo here ever since. What I mean by that is: living *here* as a guest, with grace, siempre.

I’m also not blind to the patterns.

Migration from the U.S., Canada, and Europe into LATAM has exploded in the last few years, and it’s brought with it a very real wave of gentrification. Rising rents. Displacement. Tourists playing at local life without learning the language, without building relationships, without contributing much beyond dollars.

I think about that a lot. I wrestle with it.

I’ll always defend people choosing to leave countries where they don’t feel safe. But I’m not here to sell Mexico, or offer up LATAM as an escape hatch. This isn’t a “move abroad” piece. It’s a practice in being a guest, not a taker.

What I've Had to Unlearn

It probably took me a full year to really untether from the U.S. pace of life and soften my expectations about so many things. Here are a few important ones.

Time and Predictability are Illusions

Things rarely happen on the timeline you had in mind. Urgency means something different here. So does "on time."

Bureaucracy and infrastructure have a vibe—unpredictable but persistent. One day the internet’s solid, the next your power’s out for six hours. And somehow, you adjust.

Eventually, you stop trying to impose your timeline on everything. You learn to surrender. Life gets a little easier. Less stressful.

A lot of what we call "efficiency" back home is really just dressed-up, extractive productivity. Control in disguise.

If you show up with a Western, white privilege, expecting everything to move at the speed you’re used to, you’ll be frustrated. Let that shit go.

Relationships Over Transactions

I'm still working on this one, as a constant practice. I’m a Gen X only child, raised by two deeply private, hermit-like parents. I got good at being alone. Good at self-reliance.

But in Latin America, *relationships* aren’t optional. They’re the fabric and the connective tissue of most everything. The way anything and everything gets done.

People greet each other. They ask how you’re doing—and mean it. Even passing interactions come with eye contact and acknowledgment. Whether it's your barista, your neighbor, your taxista of the day, there’s an expectation of presence.

Small talk isn’t small. It’s oxygen.

That kind of everyday relational rhythm was new to me. And deeply needed.

When our beloved Xina—our adopted senior Rottweiler—was dying in April 2020, our vet Ricardo didn’t just do his job and leave. He stayed. Held space. Walked with us through her crossing with care. Let us cry. Gave us time.

Francisco, our handyman, dug her 1-meter cubed grave with only a digging bar, a shovel, and a lot of empathy and generosity.

Everywhere we’ve lived in LATAM, we’ve experienced that kind of care (landlords, vets, taxistas, shop owners and employees where we frequent). That kind of *withness.*

Not just being around people. Being *in it* with them.

Hustle Culture Worship Isn’t a Thing

LATAM is entrepreneurial as hell—but not in the U.S. "grind till you drop" way.

Burnout isn't glorified. Rest, family time, and long lunches are part of the rhythm. There's not the same obsession with productivity hacks. People work hard, but not at the expense of living. Quality over quantity.

The best work is iterative. The best ideas grow in layers. If you're waiting for perfection, you're probably holding back something that's already good enough.

Uncertainty Isn’t an Emergency

Uncertainty isn’t code for “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.” It’s just... part of the day.

Plans still matter. But they flex. You learn to do the thing with the info you’ve got, and then adjust when the power cuts, or the road closes, or the rules change mid-process.

It’s not about passively waiting things out. It’s about staying in motion *while* knowing you’ll probably need to reroute.

It’s a skill. And once you stop expecting everything to be locked in, you stop feeling like the sky is falling every time something shifts.

Formality Doesn’t Mean Distance

Formality gets a bad rap in U.S. culture—like it’s a barrier to connection. But here, it’s often how you start.

“Buenos días.” “Con permiso.” “Licenciada.” These aren’t signs of distance. They’re part of a rhythm that builds trust. You start with respect. You build from there.

The warmth shows up too—it just doesn’t rush in waving jazz hands.

Rain Happens

Especially in wet season. If you wait for it to stop raining before you go anywhere, you might never leave the house, LOL.

It’s Not as Dangerous as They Want You to Think

If you’ve only ever heard about Mexico (or anywhere in LATAM) from U.S. media, you’d think it’s nonstop cartels and kidnappings. That narrative is tired—and intentionally misleading.

Is there violence here? Sure. Just like there is everywhere. But on the whole, Mexico is *objectively* safer than the U.S. by most measures. Especially if you’re not living in fear of mass shootings every time you go to the grocery store.

We feel safer here (less so by the end of our time in Nicaragua because Ortega = Dictator). Full stop.

You Are Not the Exception

Rugged individualism isn't a thing. Community support is built-in, and being self-sufficient to a fault is seen as odd.

Exceptionalism doesn't earn you favors. You're not special just because you come from the U.S. (or elsewhere). Hierarchy isn't absent—it's just navigated differently. Respect, formality, and knowing when to push or defer are key.

Living here has meant unlearning the reflex to center myself. It’s not about disappearing—it’s about decentering. Being part of something, not above it.

Still “Unlearning”

Eight years in, I still catch myself trying to force clarity where ambiguity is just part of the deal. I still bump into habits and assumptions that don’t quite belong here. And when I do, I try to pause. Reroute. Listen.

There’s no arrival. No moment when you suddenly “get” it all. Just deeper presence. A little more humility. Fewer freakouts when things don’t go to plan.

Some things that seem broken just need context. Some things don’t need fixing at all.

At this point, I don’t need to mark my LATAM anniversary publicly. But the unlearning? That’s ongoing. And honestly, it’s become one of the best parts.

Te quiero, Mexico. 🇲🇽 Te quiero, Nicaragua. 🇳🇮

Have you seen Petey the Seeing Eye Donkey yet?

He’s a two-year-old donkey living on a farm in the U.S. His best friend is Luna, a blind horse. Every day, Petey helps Luna out of the stables and into the pasture. He guides her away from hazards, waits for her when she hesitates, and keeps her moving safely through her world. It’s binge-worthy content.

His following across the socials is as big as his beautiful donkey heart. I have serious donkey goals in my 2nd Act of life, so Petey is a personal fave.

Petey on TikTok | Instagram | YouTube

Through Luna, Petey has found an almost singular, heart-full purpose—that seems to bring him joy.

(Donkeys are also social and do better paired with other donkeys or horses, so maybe that’s part of his bond with Luna. But the way he’s adapted to her reality with extra care and empathy, that’s what makes him special.)

Some people move through life the way Petey does. They find an immediate and undeniable connection to a curiosity that turns into a path. They just know.

A musician picks up a guitar and feels an instant pull. A scientist stares at the stars and knows, deep down, this is it. A social worker, doctor, or other type of healer feels the call through service.

But for a lot (or most) of us, it’s messier. The signs might be there (screaming at us in plain view, in some cases), but we hesitate. We ignore them. We intellectualize and tell ourselves, “That sounds fun, but I need to focus on this thing over here.”

I do it all the time. It shows up most often as busy work instead of making time for creative work or projects that are closer to “I’d love to do **that** with the rest of my life.” It’s me staying small in those moments.

Initiated Moments

This isn’t necessarily another guide on how to “uncover” your purpose. (Though if that’s where you are right now, has fantastic programs to help you unearth it.) This is an invitation to notice and welcome in the synchronicities that are already leading you toward your purpose — and being brave enough to stop resisting them.

Each of us has initiating moments, breadcrumbs leading us toward purpose. Ixchel describes them as Initiated Collective Purpose. Meaning, events in our lives moving us toward our purpose, that we’re meant to embody for the good of the collective.

You don’t need a full life map to begin. Sometimes all you need is to pause and name the moments that have drawn you into alignment with yourself at a body level. Turning points that felt more like remembering than deciding.

For me, those have included:

• Being at a really low point in my late teens/early 20’s, deciding to go back to school, and meeting Ixchel there, and gaining/growing into a chosen family I really needed

• My first “corporate” gig, working in specialty retail, where the Founders gave me a big ‘ol canvas on which to experiment with learning video production, L&D, and designing product and sales trainings on the job.

• Making the decision with Ixchel in 2016 (mostly initiated by her) to take a break from the U.S. and move to LATAM

• Adopting dogs (in Nicaragua and Mexico) and officially becoming a dog person (I’ve had cats throughout my life but when we adopted our GSD, Hugo in 2017, that changed everything in perspective).

These moments didn’t come packaged with clear instructions. But looking back, I can see how each one (and the other initiated moments of my life) showed up at the right time — each nudging me closer to what I’m here to do. That’s not always a straight, linear path.

Getting Out of Our Own Way

My 54th Solar Return is coming up in a few weeks. I’ve been sitting a lot lately in my desires for the unfolding of this second act. What I’ve said yes to. What I’ve resisted. What keeps circling back, quietly asking to be honored.

I know what resonates in my body when I speak my ICPs I’ve claimed, out loud:

• Make art and support artists

• Use my privilege to center, support, and amplify Queer, NB, Trans, and BIPOC creators

• Make friends with animals and plants

• Glow up more co-operative models of our future of work

And yet, hesitation, fear, and resistance to following through on those things pop up all the time in the form of my Ego. The inner wounded child negotiations with all the “shoulds” that echo from capitalism, survival instinct, and old identities I’ve outgrown.

(We literally have a donkey that lives across the road from us here in San Cristóbal—who I’ve been hearing for a year and a half, have wanted to meet, and somehow, I haven’t yet.)

We assume Purpose has to be obvious before we act. We second-guess what feels natural. We assume it has to be grand or official before we trust it.

We wait for clarity instead of recognizing that clarity often comes from paying attention to synchronicity, and from movement, not before it.

Petey didn’t sit around trying out different farm jobs before deciding on this one. He didn’t debate whether he was qualified. He just did what made sense in the moment, and his role became clear through doing it.

If you’re looking for direction, pay attention to what already holds meaning.

• What’s the work you do instinctively, even without recognition?

• If you designed a “perfect day,” what acts of joy would you fill it with?

• What bigger issues (in the world or in your community) get the hairs on the back of your neck standing up?

• What do people naturally come to you for?

• What patterns keep pulling you back, no matter how much you try to pivot?

You don’t have to find purpose so much as you really should stop ignoring it.

Side Note: Not Everyone is a Petey (And That’s Okay)

Now, let’s talk specialists and generalists for a moment, because this is kind of a larger love letter to both. I am a proud generalist

Petey has found his one clear role. That’s beautiful.

But some of us don’t.

Some of us are specialists. Others are translators, connectors, and pattern-seekers.

Some people have a singular purpose, their specialized gift to others.

Others puddle-hop, sample the universe, and reflect that into the world.

Both are valid.

The mistake? Thinking one is better than the other.

We often overcomplicate our search for Purpose when what we need is to notice what’s already been initiating us. Through quiet synchronicities, relationships, and repeated patterns, purpose shows up—and the real work is getting out of our own way so we can respond to it.

Whether you're a specialist with a clear lane or a generalist piecing together a mosaic life, there's no right way to ‘arrive.’ But there *is* a right time to stop ignoring what’s been calling you—and that time is now.

If you’ve been in a season of transition or questioning, this might be the moment to pause and ask: “What have I noticed that’s already been trying to lead me back to myself?”