Creative ecosystems for ADHD squirrels
Internet People: Issue 128
Welcome to Internet People 🌀 A weekly roundup of fresh ideas to fuel your creative process & help you navigate the mindf*ck of being a creative person in the digital age
🎨 Bare Minimum Artist’s Way
We’re in full swing of our 12-week Bare Minimum Artist’s Way — our ADHD-friendly take on Julia Cameron’s classic. Why? Because half-assing it to the finish line beats quitting at week 3.
Week 10 is about self-protection, but not the good kind…
At this stage of The Artist’s Way, it’s time to confront the toxic comfort behaviors we defend with our whole chest, even when they’re actively blocking our creativity. We cling to these blocks because they help us feel in control — even if they also keep us small.
👉 Listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
👉 Read the article on Substack
💬 Crowdsourced from Coworking Club
Every week, we ask a ~very important~ question to our beloved Coworking Club members, and they chime in with sticky notes. Here’s the latest:
🚨 Happening soon — free coworking session!
There’s a 1-hour session today at 11am PT / 2pm ET and we’d love to see you there!
Our audio class — The Perfectionist’s Guide to Taking Action on Creative Ideas!
If you’ve been sitting on a great idea but your perfectionism has you in a chokehold, we understand. We spent years spiraling over the fonts and colors when the advice to “just start” failed us over and over again.
In this 2-hour audio class (bc who has the attention span for video courses??), we explore:
10 sneaky ways perfectionism might be holding you back
3 mindset shifts to transform your relationship with creative work
5 easy strategies that will actually help you take creative action
We designed this class to feel like a podcast (but wayyyyy deeper) 👀 We open up about our struggles with perfectionism and share the strategies that we use every single day as creative professionals.
In a world of super serious productivity content, this class will inspire you without overwhelming you 😌
We have a theme this week: digital gardening!
A digital garden is basically a messy, ever-evolving personal database where you plant half-baked ideas, let them grow over time, and shape them when they start to make sense. If you’re constantly falling down new rabbit holes and want a way to capture and connect all your different interests, may we suggest starting your very own digital garden????
📚 Read
Influencer or Digital Gardener? How quiet voices create resonance in a noisy digital world by
Is loud, multi-platform visibility the only way to make an impact? Camille Mendoza explores how digital gardeners build resonance without the influencer hustle.
Digital Gardeners thoughtfully choose ideas from gardens they explore—the books, the experiments, the Substacks, the conversations. They process these discoveries through their unique lens, and create something meaningful they can share.
🎧 Listen
3 Steps to Get Un-Lost as a Creative by Creative Pep Talk
If you’re burned out from the self-promotion grind and it feels like something is failing, broken, or just wrong with your creative business — this episode feels like an honest chat with a friend who really gets it.
Okay okay, this isn’t technically on theme… but this podcast rec was too good to hold onto for another week!! If you want an audio experience about digital gardens specifically, keep scrolling to the “Watch” section.
🔮 Explore
Sublime is a super cool second-brain/digital garden platform for ADHD squirrels like us who need a simple, beautiful place to store all the cool Internet things we find, but need something more visual than Notion.
We love their tagline: Save anything that makes you go “whoa.”
🍿 Watch
Creating a digital garden to end my doomscrolling by Anna Howard
We’ve all heard “create more than you consume!” …but how? This video dives into following your curiosity, how to take better notes, and becoming a more interesting person in the process — a lil crash course on growing your own creative ecosystem.
If you’d rather listen than watch, here’s the podcast version of this video!
Hard-hitting questions to stretch ur brain (and start weirder conversations)
(It would make very happy if you would be vulnerable and comment your most recent rabbit hole to make her feel better about the amount of true crime interrogation footage she’s been watching lately!!!!!!!)
Because sometimes, you just need to ~think with your eyes~ to spark your next idea
For all our Super Nerds who want to plummet straight to the depths the digital gardening rabbit hole — Maggie Appleton is your person. She wrote A Brief History & Ethos of Digital Garden, and it has all the information your brain might ever want!!
ttyl :)
& , ur favorite Internet PeopleCheck out last week’s issue:
Happening at Internet People
️👯♀️ Join the Coworking Club — first 3 sessions free with code FOCUS
🪶 90-min Writing Club session every Monday & Saturday!
🎙️ Listen to the Internet People podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
🎧 Grab our $33 audio class for perfectionists & procrastinators
My most recent rabbit hole was a series of Reddit threads about Icelandic naming conventions because not only do Icelanders not have last names (they use patronyms and matronyms), all first names must be on an approved list (or you’ll need to apply to have the name added by a committee). Fascinating!
Last night I got in a deep rabbit hole shopping for a beaded necklace. Mostly on Etsy, which I haven't explored in awhile, and also across Instagram trying to find a small business whose values align with me before I buy something! Ultimately decided to go shopping locally this weekend and order one of the ones I loved on Etsy if I don't find anything in person.