Digital Gardening, Audience Growth & Just Doing the Thing with Podge Thomas

Hello and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices and systems for creative work. And often a podcast where I get to talk to the coolest people, the people that I'm learning from, the people whose classes I'm taking, the people who I collaborate with, and today I'm so excited to bring you an episode with Podge Thomas, who is a writer, a coach, a brilliant creative thinker, someone who knows notion inside and outside, builds entire worlds and digital gardens and systems for her clients and herself and her students. And it was so lucky to have just taken her digital gardening class that is really through this lens of decolonizing education and learning. And I knew I just had to have her on Common Shapes. So I'm so excited to share this episode and this interview with Podge with you today. Before we jump in, I just want to remind you, you can always download the free Creative Ideation Portal, which you can find at codicookapparat.com/podcast or you can grab it in the show notes. And it's a three day guide that pairs well with the first three episodes of this season of Common Shapes. You can map out your creative projects, figure out how to move the needle forward, what you want to work on next, and then get those projects in the world. So it's totally free. Grab a copy with Love2. Here how it goes. Support you through the process. All right, let's get to it. Here is my conversation with the amazing Podge Thomas. Podge welcome to Common Shapes. It is so nice to have you and to see you and to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me. For those listening, I originally found Podge's work through everyone's favorite Amelia Frooby because you were on Amelia's podcast and then I started reading your newsletter. And then as newsletters go, I would open it sometimes, not all the time, but I saw you starting to write about digital gardening and was very lucky to just take a class with you on digital gardening. Before we get into digital gardening, my first question on Common Shapes is always, I'd love to hear about your business ecosystem. What makes it up? Is it teaching, consulting, client work, sort of the true, how do you make a living, an earning, what is the business ecosystem look like? Full disclosure, you're catching me in a pivot actually. So my business currently is not sustaining me. It is not making, it's keeping the lights on and it's paying the bills, but it is not currently profitable really. And I say that just to caveat everything because my business right now is, it's workshops. That's what I'm doing. I spent seven, eight years doing, done for you work, consulting, you know, general business operations. I got into management. I got into operations and then I got into doing notion builds. So I would go into small businesses and I would build out these big elaborate notion systems. And I got to a place where I realized I don't want to do that anymore. I liked doing the building in notion. But what I didn't enjoy was feeling like an employee. It's really because I was sometimes working with my clients for years at a time and I felt like an employee and it wasn't therefore I worked with great people. But I have been running from traditional employment since 2017 and I just felt like that's where I was and that was just a result of conditioning right like we're just all conditioned to like the robots anyway. So I realized or I made a decision sometime in 2024, let me transition, let me try to move away from the one on one work and into into doing workshops. And it wasn't just I don't want to do this. What else can I do? It was actually really a true pull toward creating curriculums. I had been doing such a wide variety of work over so many years and that's just my work as a self employed person right. That's not to even mention all the years of work that I did before that as an employee. So I really became much more aware that there were frameworks inside of the work that I was doing. But at the same time I was trying to move away from things being rigid. I wanted things I wanted my frameworks to be flexible. So anyway, early 2025 I was still I was working with my last retainer client still and I ran my first workshop. It was a small group workshop. It eventually turned into the digital gardening workshop that you and I just did together and I'm going to run that again in the new year. Then I'm doing a couple of small workshops in the next couple months before the end of the year. So now it's starting. So you know, the short answer to your question is I run workshops. I'm teaching essentially right like I'm making things up in my head and then I'm talking people into buying it for me. I thought of something. There we are. And that's how we do business people. That's how we do business. I thought of it right. And so I know that it's going to take me a couple years before this is actually going to be more financially sustainable. But I am really happy doing this work. I really enjoy reaching more people. I really enjoy sharing my ideas. You talked about my newsletters. You picked up on some on a very intentional change, which was a few months ago. I started working on a very specific strategy to work in public essentially. So when you get my emails every week, mostly what you're reading is like, "Podge had a new idea." And this is how she thought. This is what she thinks about it, right? This is a framework around it or this is there. Here are some guidelines or here's some new information. And that's me just going, "Well, what did I do this week? What changed how am I thinking about my subject matter?" If I had to hand this off to somebody in an elevator for two minutes, like what would this be? Like, it's that kind of stuff. And so the ecosystem of my business is I sell workshops, I write emails, and I am very much like leaning into what's pulling me and just trying to follow what's pulling me, which actually is really why I have been loving your work because you have such an intuitive approach to what you're doing. And it looks supernatural, not supernatural, but it looks very natural. And that's what I'm craving because that is, like I mentioned the conditioning before. I've been so conditioned to be a student, to be a good daughter, to be a parent in a specific way, to be a good worker, right? The conditioning to be very sort of obedient and submissive in this culture is so deeply ingrained. I am desperate for anything that looks organic. And it's no coincidence that you and I have sort of found each other at this time because you're out here just like not that you don't have any structure, but it just looks like you're having a great time just freewheeling it. And I'm just like looking for somebody who has like very unstructured and organic structure. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for all of that. And I'm just going to say, for your honesty about that difference between thriving and sustaining in the business and what that looks like. I want to maybe start or go back a little bit to notion, which is why I first got so excited about your work is I'm as many listeners know, like I just love notion and use it in my business and my personal life. And my question is sort of short, but it's like why notion because I think like systems wise were so overwhelmed. There's obsidian. There's a sauna. There's trello. There's slack. There's discord. There's substach. There's Patreon. It's like we're just like there's arena. There's sublime. There's so many different platforms for sharing, for organizing and I'd love to hear like the origin story of like what brought you to notion and why. Does it keep you coming back? [laughter] Yeah, not making it, neither was making any money off of this from Notion, but maybe we should. I know, I'm like, "Notion, are you listening?" Right, is that a thing? I think they do have, like, I think you can be a Notion affiliate. No, what's so funny? You can be a Notion affiliate. You can be a Notion affiliate, and I have tried to do it. And it does never work, which is so hilarious to me, because I've turned, but you know, everybody's using Notion at this point, so like, they went, they literally went within a few years, they went from a million users to 35 million to 100 million users, and that was the last number I saw in late 2024. That's a lot of people, right? Okay, so my origin story with Notion is that I was in a mastermind for the whole of 2020 with a community that is now defunct, and in that class, the person that was running it, that masterclass was running it. She had a Notion template, and that's when I first saw Notion. And I used that for about six months, and it was totally static. It was like checkboxes and lists and columns and, you know, bullet points and stuff like that. But I really liked it. I liked that there was like, multiple ways that you could format it. Somebody else in that community ran a, and still runs a community to teach you how to use Notions, called the Notion Mastery course. That person was Marie Pullin, and I heard about this, and I was like, "Oh, great. Let me go check out. She had some videos online. Let me go check out the videos." And that's where I saw the databases, and I was like, "What?" I've been messing around with checkboxes, and there was this. So I immediately signed up for that course. I'm still in that community years later. And so why Notion? The customizability and the flexibility is just almost infinite, right? Like you can make it look and feel and work almost any way you want it to, and the other reason, the other case for Notion is metacognition. So if you are in your diverse, if you were harmed by traditional education, and now you're an adult, especially as an entrepreneur or a creative, and you're trying to figure out how to learn, right? Like you make doilys, and that's great. But like how do you mark? How do you do marketing? How do you do sales? How do you do operations? How do you do, you know, client management, like all of those kinds of things can be really a challenge if you never really learned how to learn. And having an operational hub or some kind of, you know, some kind of whatever work it is that you do in Notion, you, in order to set it up the way that you need it, you have to really think about how you're thinking about something. You have to think about how you're thinking about it, and you have to think about how you work. And that is metacognition. And that is the case for Notion. It has made me, I'm definitely smarter than I was a few years ago. I feel that that's a really, that's, I've never really thought of that. Like I'm definitely smarter from how I use Notion. I also took Marie Poulin's Notion Mastery. Oh nice. That's how I learned pretty much. Yeah. Did you have a finish it? That's a giant, giant curriculum. I mean, I feel like at the time I got pretty close, but I haven't like kept up with, yeah, all the new stuff as well. All the new stuff. Yeah, but it's amazing. Also, just as like a business ecosystem model, I am really fascinated by the like, higher price buy-in that you get the lifetime access to. You know, that like, as it changes and the course evolves and she adds things like you just have access to it forever, which is really cool. Yes. And that brings me to, I think something that draws me to both of your work is, and you sort of just started to get at this, but is how accessible your teaching is to the neurodivergent mind, and person, which, you know, identify as and many listeners of common shapes identify as. And I think people get overwhelmed with Notion. Sometimes like the infiniteness, the like infinite possibilities are actually what I think can feel a little scary. So I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about even like, if someone's starting from scratch or just going in or wanting to look at Notion, like, what do you usually say to someone who maybe does have a different learning style or learning disability or is neurodivergent? Yeah, I think if the, you know, if the struggle is how do I start this from scratch? My answer is usually, well, what do you want to use it for? What's your use case? Like, what is it that you see in this tool? Right? Because there has to be a lot of people are just going to look at Notion and go, no, thank you. So if you've said yes, please do it. Why? Why have you said yes, please do this? What is it you think it can do for you? And I think that's a really good place to start. And then, you know, sometimes videos can be really great. I mean, I spent many years watching just Marie's like YouTube videos, right? Which would sometimes be like two hours long. And they would take me like four hours to watch because I would just be pausing and playing around and pausing. So that's what works for me. Getting templates and recreating them, right? So I used to sell templates. I don't really, I have some on Gumro, but I don't really push them anymore because I don't actually think templates are that useful unless you're a seasoned Notion user. But if you're a new Notion user and you want to use it for like a CRM, go find a template of free or a cheap, cheap template and recreated. Don't just use it. Actually, figure out how to rebuild it completely. And that will teach you so much about how to use Notion. And along the way, you'll figure out how to then tweak it and change it to work for you because that's really what templates are for. Templates are not really there so that you can boom, get started on something right away because a template is always going to reflect how somebody, how the creator thinks about that thing. So the template is really there for you to take and then for you to change it and sometimes quite significantly. I still buy templates and tweak around with them. And they're, you know, usually totally unrecognizable by the end. And I use it and it's just for that practice. Okay, well, how did they do this and why did they do it this way? And sometimes they have little things here and there that are really helpful. Oh, you, you know, you wanted to, you wanted a sales CRM and you use the gallery view and then you put pictures of everybody on your network in this. You know, little things like that where you start to figure out, oh, I like this. And then sometimes, and this is, this is true, I think, for neurodiverse people. It's also true for Scorpio. It's definitely true for, it's definitely true for projectors. What you, you know, the notion setup that you have today is probably not going to be the notion setup that you are going to have in six months. I just did a walk through video for a community that I'm in to show them how I'd set up my space. Did this walk through? I sent it out to, I don't know, maybe like a dozen people who wanted to see it. And probably five days later, it's complete. So yeah, so it's, it's not supposed to be if you're new to notion, it's not supposed to be a static system by any stretch of the imagination, not in its function and not in its form. So whatever it is that you create today, whether you're creating something from scratch, watching one of Marie's videos, whether you are, you've grabbed a template and you're recreating it or you're tweaking around with it, whatever, whatever is you land, you'll only probably land there for some period of time. It might be months, it might be years, it might be weeks, it might be a couple days, but that's the gig. It's supposed to be played with. It is supposed to, you know, I think people sometimes shy away from spending a whole day fudzing with their systems, but it's not just about getting the system to where you need, need it to be in the process of fudzing with systems. We learn so much about what we need and what we don't need and how we want to work. It's not just about, oh, I need to organize, it's not just about, oh, maybe I need to like clean up my art space over here because I want it to be more aesthetically pleasing. It's also about am I still using this glitter? I'm not using the glitter anymore, I can get rid of the glitter or like, oh my gosh, I forgot that I had this glitter, I actually have a project in my right, like that's, that is the gig. Something I'm thinking about, which please correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't currently use any social media. You have your newsletter. So my question is, because we talk so much about this on common shapes about being platformless or having no social media. And so I'm curious, because I want to move towards talking about your teaching and digital gardening, but I'm thinking about like, how do you get people into your ecosystem? Like how do you get new newsletter subscribers? How do you get people to sign up for your classes? Like, do you have a strategy or are you winging it? Or is it somewhere in between? Like, do you have a growth vision? Asking for a friend. Oh, stop. Don't be coy about your own growth. No, my newsletter growth has been very stagnant since I left social media. Has it? Yes. Absolutely. The number goes down most days. But so I am very curious about this for myself and others. For yourself and others? Yeah. I read something. the other day. You'll like ask me anything and somebody was like, "How do you grow though?" And you were like, "Don't worry about it. Like make the thing and the people will come." And so there's a cover lianess about that. But well, it on the face of it. But I think the truth is probably for you and for me, even though we definitely have very different sized audiences, do the thing. I've just spent so many years not doing the thing and now that I'm doing the thing, people are coming. So this is what I'll say. My current strategy is to actually just show up. And I say that because I tend to or being a bit of a hermit, in my middle age, in middle age people, especially middle age gen X's, we don't want to go anywhere, we don't want to talk to anyone. Like life has been hard for us. Leave me alone. I'm having a hot flash, right? Just like get out of my face. And then I'm a projector. So it's my tendency to, it's my tendency to hide. But what I know as a projector is that I need to be as bright as possible so that people will come to me. And it's really simple. It's sometimes as simple as like responding to emails within a couple of days, rather than a couple of months, which is genuinely sometimes what happens. I'm in a couple of communities and I just like, hey, I just talk to people, you know, like, oh, I answer questions or I ask questions right, like I'm just trying to participate a little bit more. So that's part of it. The other strategy I have is running classified. All right. I'm looking for places to run classified. I run and add on Amelia Ruby's podcast a couple summers ago. That was very fruitful for me, actually. I think I got about 60 people in a month and that was really, really helpful. I've run classified off of her stuff before actually just on her newsletters. I'm running a classified on your newsletter next week. And I've I have a couple other people who I'm sort of looking at. Like, oh, I think that I think this is my audience. And I think this is a good fit for my business. And I'm realizing I probably didn't even really fully answer your question earlier, like what's my ecosystem? So I actually do follow a specific strategy, not just for the growth of my business, but also for the structure of my business and how I help people move through what it is that I'm creating. Do you know Regina and a John O you have to know, yes, you have to know Regina. So Regina is it's hard to sort of describe Regina, but she creates a lot of content around the idea of having an idea first business, an idea first platform. And she has a bunch of different courses and classes, some of the round demands, some of them alive. And she really helps you think through in a very, very, very deep way. What are your ideas? What are you thinking about? What sets you apart? And then how do you talk about that? What are your frameworks? What's the language? Who is this for? And a lot of what she's talking about and who she's helping is based in systems of oppression. So this was like an easy match for me because everything that I do is really built on the foundation of decolonizing knowledge. So her strategies and her tools and her templates and her, I mean, there's so much is very prolific has really been helping me just dig into the ideas. What am I talking about? What do you really mean? Right? This is work that I've been doing for a long time, but this is the first time that I'm really pushing myself to articulate it. And it turns out that the more I articulate it and this has really been happening in earnest for about, yeah, probably since about March or April, what has been happening is that the more clear I am, the more people are finding me and it's definitely organic. I'm definitely pulling people in from, you know, classifieds and ads and stuff. But I mean, somebody, I don't want to call them out, but somebody who was in the digital gardening class, like just mentioned me and it's link on Friday. And I've had 30 people come through since last Friday. I've never had that many people come through in such a short period of time. Somebody just, E-Mommy yesterday and said that you sent them. So that seems to be happening more and more. But when I went on to your ask, you know, ask me anything, somebody was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, what's, you know, how do you grow? And you said, don't really worry about it. And so I really took that to heart. And I'm not super, super worrying about it. I have a strategy I want to run classifies and people's emails who have a good, who have a, who have the, you know, the same or similar audience who have an engaged audience who match my values. That's super important to me. But there's a lot of word of mouth. There's a lot more word of mouth than, than I believe there would be when I was doing one on one services. And I was told, this is relationship based marketing. If you want to sell courses or classes, you need a, you need a traffic based marketing strategy. And that's not untrue. But there's a lot of traction that comes from building relationships, just one on one relationships. People do find me that way. Thank you for just handing back my own advice and asking of yours. Our budding relationship is such a perfect visual of the spiral that like I heard you on Amelia's podcast, I started reading your newsletter. You got clear with the ideas. I saw that, felt attracted to that, came to your class, loved your class, invited you on my podcast. You know what I mean? It's like, it's so cool to just be like, yeah, we're just showcasing that example. But what I want to say and get us into talking about digital gardening, that's so cool about you kind of clarifying like, what do I want to say? What are the ideas I'm thinking about is, you know, I had seen the concept of digital gardening. I think I had seen that Anna Howard YouTube video going around and, you know, had heard the language, but I hadn't heard someone frame it up as a way to decolonize our learning. And that is like, and I've, I've taken whole classes in decolonizing our learning, but I hadn't seen those two things brought together. Like, how can I use notion or digital gardening to unpack, you know, how systems of oppression show up in my learning style and how I collect information. And so I'd love, I'd love to just maybe even specifically talk about the class. Like, how did you are actually, well, yeah, I guess that this, in my one question, I have like eight subquestions, which is basically like, how did you get into digital gardening? What is it for you? And in terms of like the class, like, what made you want to structure it in the way that you did with that framework of decolonizing educational practices? So to answer that question, I want to ask you a question first, because I genuinely want to know, and I think it will help us segue into me answering this, when did you realize that everything needed to be connected? Or was it always that way? Because it's super connected, right? Like, that is what is, that's what stands out about your work is how connected it is. Like, there is no separation of like quilting, dancing, photography, like, it's all the same, it's all part of the same thing. I can see timeline wise when it happened, like a couple years ago, it happened from my students coming to me. And being like, I'm so scattered. And they were coming to me. And in my head, I'm like, you're coming to me? Like, I'm a quilter and a writer and a, and I have a dance degree. And now I'm going to go back to school for writing. And I'm this and this and this. Like, that seems weird. But I realized that I had found the through line, which was like improvising as a compositional practice. And that is what is the same with everything. Like, that's why it looks sort of intuitive. Or, you know, it's like, I'm doing a lot of spontaneous choice making, but I'm doing it through the lens of improvising, whether I'm quilting, writing, dancing, teaching, doing creative business projects. And so, yeah, it kind of came from my students reflecting it back to me. Like, it seems like you have this structure or, or through line, what is it? And I had to then ask myself. And I was like, oh, it's, it's like, I'm an improviser as an artist. And that kind of like the idea first business, this is something I feel like a million. I have really talked about before is like, I really have an artist first business. Like, I see myself as an artist first and a business owner second. And that is how it's all connected. It's like, I'm just an artist. So, everything I do is art making. Right. Which is like, in my idea first world, that would be the idea. Right? Like, if I was to sort of interpret that, that that the idea is, the idea is being an improvising artist. So, there are a lot of people out there marketing people, salespeople, branding people, you gotta get them. And they do the thing. A world told like, "Nee, you sure have a perspective or have a lens?" and many people really don't. I think a lot of people, especially if you're like in the market, like everybody does marketing, which is great. But not that many people are standing out as a marketer with a foundation in a value- in a value-based idea. So anybody can teach notion. Anybody could teach digital gardening. But if I want to reach and meet my best fit people, I have to talk about why it really matters to me. And the reason why notion and digital gardening and reclaiming knowledge and becoming our own best self-teachers, the reason all of that matters to me is because the system of colonization has stripped away so much from me and from my ancestors and from the future. It has to stand on something substantial. Digital gardening, yeah, that would be super fun. And that might bring people in, but I don't think it's going to get people to stay. Because for so long, I would just sit in my room and think about these things. But when I started to say them out loud, you know, I can't tell you how many, just in the last few months, how many emails I get from people saying, I was so bored in class, I used to fall asleep, and my teacher used to throw the blackboard eraser at me. Stories like that, so many stories, right? So if I'm saying to people, were you bullied in school, were you attacked our learner and you were forced to be an oral learner? Were you, you know, did you have ADHD and there was nothing in place to help support you, right? Like all of those types of things. Did you show up as a person of color in a classroom with a very white-led curriculum, right? Those type, when I talk about those things out loud and then I say, and what you can, if you're a notion user, you can actually use notion to reclaim your ability to be a curious human learning machine on this planet. And I say it like that because that was what happened to me. And I'm not so special that like, I'm the only person who ever lived on this planet and was harmed in this way and had this experience. So if it happened to me, I know that it's happened to other people, but that was very much my experience. I thought something was wrong with me, right? I really thought my curiosity was dead. I just thought that I just didn't have anything left in me. It's been, it been brow beaten out to me. And so when I came across digital gardening, it just clicked. And I watched that one video and I remember it 'cause I was in my hammock. (laughs) Out on the porch, I was in the hammock and I was watching it on my laptop 'cause I was going through Amelia's click through and I clicked on it and I watched this video and she was talking about digital gardening as, she described it, it just felt like the coziest, like loveliest thing I could imagine, just feeling carefree in the pursuit of knowledge without the constraint of any of that conditioning of obedience and submission. Just the title intrigued me and so I read it. The title intrigued me and so I watched it. I'm gosh, what did I think about it? What stood out to me and then de-contextualizing those thoughts into my own ideas? What else is this connected to? And this comes back to that connectivity, which is really an antidote to siloing, which is what we see in education and it's what we see in work at work, that it turns out it's all connected. There really isn't a big difference between the gardening videos that I watch and the radical politics videos that I watch. You know, the people that I read, all these things that I really convinced myself like I am just an undisciplined, I'm unfocused, that's not true. So for me, digital gardening was a way to heal, which sounds ridiculous that I use notion to heal. I use notion to heal my inner child. Me too, I'm right there with you. But it's really true and I love the irony of it being a tech tool made in Silicon Valley. These tools are available to us. They might have been built by tech, I mean, Ivan Zhao, I think is a little different, but these are tools that are our disposal and we can use them if we want to. So digital gardening was originally part of my first workshop, which was called Notion Systems by You and For You, where I taught people how to build their own notion systems based on how they were thinking and wanted to learn. And at the last minute, I kind of shoehorned this section into the workshop and then I was like, well, that's this is all I'm gonna teach from now on. This is great. So then I just pulled it out, I made it's own thing and I'm sure it's going to evolve again by the time I run it again in the New Year and it'll evolve again and again and again. But the core principle is notions of great tool for cross-pollination, it's a great tool for metacognition, it's a great tool for collecting clips and news and video, and it's a great tool for making notes. And then you can connect all these databases. So that's the core idea. Use notion because it's this great tool for connectivity and we're gonna bring, we're going to increase our awareness about how colonization has really, we think that it's this thing that happened in England a long time ago. It started in England, right? And then came to the US, like we think it's this thing but it's not, it is ever present in our lives. And so that whole first section in the class where I talk about that, that's really just to kind of raise everybody's awareness up. Okay, this is where we're coming from. This is what happened and this is where we are now and now we can use these tools to sort of become much deeper thinkers and what I have discovered from being able to think deeply for the first time in decades, literally, is that I feel like my world is bigger. I feel like my inner and outer world are so much bigger than they were. And a lot of this is also connected to like, you know what Amelia talks about, it's slowing down, it's the algorithm, it's reclaiming our attention. Like you know, phones is just like AI, like it's all connected to that stuff as well. And I always just wanna give people an opportunity to slow down and just jump into a rabbit hole and I'll see you in five hours, you know. - I'm curious for you, and this is sort of coming back to the like, nothing siloed, you know, like what is, and we talked about this a lot in class of sort of like what is public, what is private, what is for just personal learning, what is for synthesizing for the people. And I'd love to hear, you know, on sort of a practical level, how are you interacting with your digital garden and the research that you're doing, does that feed into your newsletter? Are you working on a book project or something bigger or is it just personal enjoyment? Like tell us a little bit about the practical side of like once you've collected the links and the videos and the things to read and you're going through them and you're taking notes, what happens to them? Where do they become? - My intention with this is to kind of like what I said earlier is I'm trying to just like follow what feels right, which is not, that's not second nature to me, right? That is something that I'm learning. So I was doing some digital gardening last week and I was like, oh, I could make this public 'cause I thought so when we talked to a digit, we got like a sort of a spectrum of things that happen, right? You consume stuff, we mix a few little notes and then we sort of grow those notes into bigger ideas and then over time we grow them bigger ideas, bigger ideas and then eventually they end up, they might end up like with a video essay or a scene or a written essay or a book or write like it could end up as a curriculum, it could end up as anything as a fully formed piece of work and I hadn't, I didn't have anything yet. I just had like a lot of notes and I thought to myself, well I can't publish just like little notes, that's silly. But what I realized actually is that I can, right? I don't have to have fully formed bloomed ideas yet. So I publish a digital garden so you can go and you can check it out and you can actually see like the notes that I make, that I make on the things that I'm reading or watching web and some of them are funny and some of them are, you know, a little scathing and I do try to be as honest as possible. So there's that piece of it. The digital garden, when I'm actually just like reading and taking notes, it has to feel good, right? And I don't mean like good vibes only type good but like it has to feel right. If there's any resistance, I stop because I'm a projected weight. While human designing you, I feel like there's no way you're a projector because I just feel like, like all you do is create. Like do you ever even just sit down and watch TV? I feel like you're just always making things. I'm a two-four manifesto. That does actually make sense. Who gets burnt out from trying to be a generator? So you're not, you're seeing it correctly, perhaps. And I actually just started watching TV more in the last couple weeks. After I actually love watching TV, but I this year, especially doing my job full-time and then adding grad school, I really stopped relaxing in that way and I'm happy to report. I'm really into 911 loan stars starring Roblo. Roblo, it's so good. It's so good. It's like the gayest show. I'm like, what? Everybody's like gay and trans. And the super hot Muslim. Yeah. I love Marjan. Yes. Yeah. It's like, I mean, it's a little cheesy in terms of like the first episode. It's literally Roblo's job to diversify the the firefighter. It's not great TV, but it's great. Right. What's the line of like tokenizing and characters? And I'm like, you know what? Bring us all together. Thank you. Like if that's what it takes by any means necessary. Yes, exactly. But yes, I am a manifestor. I am doing probably a little too much and I do watch television. We're all trying to be generators because we live in a capitalist society, right? So I'm a projector, which means I don't have a ton of energy. So when I'm learning the hard way, what I have learned in the hard way is if it doesn't feel right, it takes longer, it feels super shitty, and then it drains my energy for anything else I want to do. So if I'm if I start reading something, and I'm like, no, this isn't what I thought it was. It's gone. It's out. I'm not just going to sit with it and read it just to put myself through, you know, just because I clipped it from the internet. And now it's in my, you know, like my digital gardening practice is very permissive. It's very, it's very, you know what it gives? It gives like kind grandma or kind aunt energy. Like, oh, do you want some cookies? What do you want to, do you want to, do you want to sit down, like watch a little TV? Like what feels good? What do you need right now, honey? That's what it is. That basically, repair it. I was just going to say I'm like, we're back to notion as repairiting. I was like, nobody ever said that to me. I was like, oh, right. That's why I'm using notion to repair myself. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. That is exactly right. So I don't know where it's going to go. This is a new practice for me. I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know where I'm going to be in a year from now. But what I know is what I do today does lay a foundation for the future. And I want that future to be this very permissive, open, welcoming, nurturing supportive space for me and anybody who wants to jump into my world. People will often, I would you have a template for that? Like, no. There's no template. We're just, we're forging this, we're building this for ourselves together. We're feeling our way through it. I know. I know it's hard. But let's just let's just be as gent like my response to, oh, let's just get through that. Or do you have a template or can I just copy that? My response to that is like, let's actually slow down. Let's just slow way down because this is not something that you have to get through or get past or get done. This is an opportunity like what feels sticky? This is like, let's use this as an opportunity to figure out what's really going on. What is really hard about this? I love to talk about a couple ways we can jump into your world, which are some workshops you have coming up. So if you're listening live, podge is actually teaching in a couple days as well as in December. So I'd love for you to tell us about those workshops. And maybe a little behind the scenes of like, what was it like to invent them or like, what was your thought in terms of like bringing in new people and doing smaller workshops? Was that like a part of bigger strategy to get the people in the ecosystem? Or are you just feeling excited to share these ideas? Tell us a little bit about the workshops and how they came to be. Yeah, so Friday the 14th, we're doing a notion, clean updates, a 19 minute workshop. So that you can declutter because if you're a notion user, I know what it's like. I do not have a cluttered notion space. I am definitely an outlier in this way. And it's not just like, oh, I teach it, so I better be it like, no, I just really, I really do keep it pretty decluttered. And any clutter I have is like hidden in the side of a page called archive. And ever now and again, I go and clean that up. So notion cleanup day is really just, I'm going to give you permission to just like, you know, push everything off the table and start over. And just using a very simple structure, very, very simple. Okay, we're just going to push everything over here. We're going to very loosely categorize it. And we're going to just have a much cleanest late. It's like, on favorite, you know, your 27 pages. And yeah, I see you. So notion cleanup day. And really, both of these workshops came from either conversation with a friend. And she was like, she's, she over the years has come to my workshops. And she was like, why aren't you doing like, why aren't you doing like a little workshop on just like cleaning up notion? And like, why aren't you doing just like a little workshop on like dashboarding? Because the next one, which is Friday, December 5th, is dashboarding. How do I make a gorgeous dashboard? How do I make it, you know, how do I make it feel the way I want it to feel? Like I love a good dashboard. I can make my dashboard feel cozy or minimalist or maximalist or sexy or friendly or spooky or spiritual or like whatever it is I want it to feel. How do I do that? And so I want to help people figure out how to do that. Those are the two workshops that are coming up. And honestly, I wasn't planning on running anymore workshops before the end of the year, but my friend was like, you have to do this. And I just thought, that's a great idea. These are very low cost offers, right? This is just an opportunity for people who are maybe hanging around watching me, thinking, I'd love to, you know, I'd love to hop on a call with Pudge and do some of that work together. But, you know, some of her bigger offers are Out of Reach, which is totally fine and understandable. And so this is this is just kind of a way in for people who honestly some of these folks have been on my some of my I've had people on my newsletter for years, you know, for years and years and years, but I was doing one-on-one work or I was doing like bigger, you know, bigger packages. And so hopefully for those people, this is an opportunity to come and, you know, dive into my world a little bit more. And and again, it's like it's testing out ideas, right? Like is this? Is that is a notion cleanup day? I want something I want to run once a quarter. Is it something I want to sell on demand? Is it something that could be something bigger? Could it grow into something else? Right. So that's what 2026 I think is even going to be for me is like, what else do I want to play around with? What other idea? I think you're going to see a lot of just like sort of what you do, right? I feel like every other day I get an email from you and you're like, oh my god, I had this great idea. And I'm like, oh my god, that's so great. I've had ideas too. I should just talk about them. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So those are the two workshops that are coming up. The, can I talk about the pricing or is that gauche? I think you should definitely. And it actually made me want to ask in sort of the spirit of like decolonizing anti-capitalism, business. I wanted to ask you like, how do you come up with prices and how, yeah, I would love to just hear about pricing. And yeah, please, it's not gauche. We love talking about money on common shapes. Yeah. So the workshops, these two workshops that are coming up, notion cleanup day and then like a notion dashboarding one-on-one, I forget what the official title is, which isn't good, but here we are. They're $35 each or you can bundle them for 60 bucks and 90 minute workshops. And then I'm also, I've also created like mini courses for them so that if you want to keep going or you want to come back and revisit it, you can sort of go through the, you know, you can watch, you can watch the recording again, but there's also sort of like curriculum and so that's that. In terms of pricing, this is a really good question. I appreciate you asking me this because we are in the middle of economic and political uncertainty and people are anxious to spend money. So for that reason, you know, I'm thinking about that, right? Like that's on my mind. I hope to in the future just have a broader suite of things available to people just like you do, right? That are at different price points that people can join where they are. And I think sometimes honestly, the pricing has to do with where you are in your business, right? The more expensive things might be intriguing to somebody who isn't yet profitable, but those more expensive product, those more expensive offers tend to be for more seasoned business owners who are bringing in a little bit more revenue, right? If what makes sense for your business budget is to spend $35 or $60 on a workshop with me, that's probably commensurate with where you are in your business, right? You might be earlier on in your business or your business might be a side gig, right? So I've said that in the past that if you have a $3,500 offer and you've got someone who's struggling to pay for it, then it might not be the right offer for them, right? And I do that for my own business, right? Right now, my revenue is very low. And so I'm not spending a lot of money on you know, classes or consulting, you know, consultants or you know, coaching work, like that's not happening right now. I'm buying what I can afford that can get me where I need to go. Like, right now I'm trying to figure out my tech stack. Oh my god, what a nightmare. What a you and I have to have a conversation about this. I was actually going to ask you, do you have something in your in your ecosystem where you talk about your tech? On my website, I list everything I use in on a resources page. So it does list out like thrive, cart, flow desk, arena, notion, like I list it like that. When I teach, I teach a class twice a year called mapping your creative business and that class we go through more of like how to set up some of the tech, but it's very quilt metaphor like patchworked together, you know, it's like I use cargo for my website, but I use thrive cart for people to check out on a class. Mostly I use thrive cart because it allows payment plans like no interest payment plans. Gumroad is, you know, they take a higher percentage of things, but I find that when I use it, I have higher sales because I think it's just I think it's really pretty to use and it's really easy to use and people like to check out on something that's pretty and easy and you can make it pay what you can, which you can actually also do with thrive cart now. But so yeah, anyways, yeah, because right now I'm looking at Podia because I host as you know, I host everything in notion, which has been fine up until now, but now people are finding me, and I'm realizing like honestly, if you're listening and you've signed up for my website and you've got and it's and it's very obviously screwy, I'm really sorry, I'm trying to figure out automations in kid like I'm trying over here. I'm I'm trying really hot, but I'm looking at Podia because there's no way for me to check analytics through notion even though it's so pretty in notion. It's bad. I've been by like marketing people like SEO people, they're always so mad at me that I use notion for all my sales pages. They're like you have no idea how many visit people visited it. And what I'll say to that is you know what my business has done just fine without knowing how many people visit a webpage like I'm glad that I've never been like hooked into like Google analytics. I don't I don't know if that would be healthy for my mind, but I also understand that maybe it would be good to see how many people are clicking through on things and I can't see that. So yeah, exactly. And I think for me the big piece for me is the security. It really is the security. I've noticed a couple people who use Podia lately just from like looking at some different classes and what people's check out is and being like oh that's they're using Podia which I've never really looked at, but like I know a lot of people also use Kajabi and it's like right now it's sort of a bummer that if you've taken like seven of my classes they're just scattered in different notion home pages like it'd be nice if someone could log in and see all their Cody classes together. And actually this is just going back to Regina. This is how I even discovered Podia because her website is on Podia and her classes are on Podia and yet it's very easy from a navigation perspective and sometimes I just worry that like it looks a little corporate but I don't know. I you like it swings around right right you you you get something that you want and then you have to give something up in return and I'm just realizing this is it's quickly becoming you know quite complex and conflicted but I wanted to just answer just another quick question that you that you asked about money like how do I price things the thing that I want to say because I do I do rail against our systems of oppression including capitalism and also the reality is I'm a woman of color my earning potential my earning power is less. So I've definitely had people approach me and say hey I really want to do this but I can't quite afford it like would you bring a price down absolutely like if you reach out to me and you say hey can I just I did this is what I can yes I don't do things for free usually because I do think it's helpful to have skin in the game like what does make sense for you I that's important I know that when I show there's I bring a different energy when I haven't made for something for sure. And so that's why I'm just trying to expand into this place where there are different there are different things for different price points along the way and as you grow and as you mature in your business and your understanding wherever is you are on that spectrum that there is more available for you as you as your revenue grows or your situation changes but that for people who are sort of newer that earlier in their business maybe their business is still a part-time thing or it's a side gig or whatever that there is something available for those people but it is still important to me that I not accidentally undervalue my work in an effort to try to rebalance the system I didn't create. Hello that's a newsletter coming right up that's a book that needs to be written. Well I love what you said because this was really big for me this year inventing fieldwork which is my small business cohort and you know it's the most expensive thing I've ever priced I mean you get so much for what it's you know like it makes sense why it's priced the way it is but you know I had never sold anything I think over like four hundred dollars and it's nine hundred fifty dollars for a three month weekly small business container there's like twenty people and I really felt that feeling of like oh I need to like there are spots that do make it accessible for some people financially but for them like I had that feeling of fear of like okay I'm having an offer offer that's capped and I have to make a certain amount of money at it and and then I stopped to be like oh wait I want this to be a group of people who are at a place in their business where nine hundred fifty dollars isn't stretching them there's three and six month payment plans like they don't have to pay it up front but that they are ready to invest that much into their business and it's actually not gonna it's not gonna serve someone like I saw people who signed up who it stretched them too much and maybe they weren't ready and then it overwhelmed them because the rest of the group was just farther along and so it didn't serve actually anyone if the tables are a little bit off in that way whereas like if I'm teaching a writing class that has no cap and it's just about like journaling and writing it's less about where you are in your business and I can be more flexible with with letting people in but yeah I really feel that where I'm like have another class coming up this year and I'm currently trying to figure out where to price it and I'm like I think I want to price it in a way that alerts people of like this is where you should be at in your own business growth to take this class and if I want to teach a super duper beginner business class I'll price it as such. This is so important I just want to say because I had a friend who also works works for herself and we just ended up on very very different paths in terms of who we were finding on the internet who could help us grow our businesses and she ended up on a very predatory path and I did not know this until several years later but she had been going to these webinars for these $10,000 programs and the objection of I can't afford that was met with we have a financing person here you can just take a loan out and so this friend ended up in debt tens of thousands of dollars because she was buying programs that she wasn't ready for and so then what would happen because this is what happens we know this she would do these programs they wouldn't work for her and who did she blame say it with me she blamed herself because that's what because that's what people like that will say that well you just not you're not really applying or did you follow every single dingle blah blah blah blah like that doesn't make any sense somebody knew in their business should not be spending $10,000 on a program you should not go into debt I don't even have any debt for my business like I it doesn't make any sense you know so and I'm talking about service-based businesses right like product businesses it's a different conversation. But yeah, so I do think that for me, the pricing, it's not, it's, yes, I, I'm trying to make my business profitable, but it's not just about me. It's about the people that I'm serving. It's about the people who are making a choice to be in my world and give up their time to read my newsletters and to come to my classes. I had somebody send me an email yesterday saying, I have never hit a buy button so quickly, I do not take that full granted. So yes, pricing, pricing for where somebody is in their business and where they are in their business does correlate to what their revenue is and then therefore how we price our office. Pudge other than your workshops, what is next? Like what are you dreaming into? Personally, business, anything you want to share. I had two surgeries this year and I've got two more coming up. So that's kind of going to take up like a big chunk of my time. I turn 50 next year and so I'm planning like just like 12 months of whatever the heck it is I can think of. Super excited. Like what can you think of Pudge that you want to do? Like let's, like you've got 12 months, let's go do it. So that's what I'm thinking of sort of personally. By this time of year, I usually know what it is I'm going to be focused on next in the coming year, but because I'm in this like new, you know, Pudge is a creative and she feels her way into things and she's reclaiming her curiosity and intuition. I am trying to poison myself to be more like Cody Cook parrot, which is to say that if I have an idea, I want to rally around it and get it out into the world somehow, whether it's a free workshop, a paid workshop and newsletter, something else, I don't know, but I want to take those ideas. If it comes to me, I want to take it and run with it and see where it goes. So that's really the promise that I'm giving myself in 2026 is just create and put it out there as an author and see who it attracts, see what people think of it, see what kind of feedback you get, see how it resonates. Da da da da da da, like very experimental. So nothing clear, I do have a very tiny idea of doing a three month container using digital gardening for like a for a project to do like a three month sprint project and I'm thinking like five or six people like super tiny. I'm thinking like a little bit of a higher ticket price, but lots of support, one on one coaching group classes, co-working labs, and then like let's get a project done based on like the principles of digital gardening and notion. So that's like one little but I'm not, I don't have anything beyond that sort of setup, but I'm definitely going to do digital gardening again in February, probably going to do it again in maybe like April, May, June, somewhere like that, and then probably run it again in the fall. I think that's, I think the digital gardening is just going to keep going a few times a year and it's just going to keep evolving until I get sick of it. Pudge, thank you so much for being on common shapes today. This was just lovely. And where can people find you? Where can people find all the information for? Workshops newsletter, etc. Yeah, so my, I mean, my systems are really terrible, but just, just go to podge-tomers.com and sign up for something somewhere. Just go there and see what happens. Listen, I don't even have, like I don't even have a sign up in the footer, like that's, it's just, it's rinky-ding. But I do actually have, and you might have people interested in this. I do have a free email course, which is like, this is my lead magnet opt in that people can get into before they get on my newsletter. And it's called Metacognitive Learning Design. Does not trip off the tongue at all. But it's, it's like six emails and it's to help you think about Metacognition. How are you thinking about learning? How are you thinking about the work that you do? And then how can you sort of deepen a self-teaching practice in your work and in your life? It's really sweet. It's just, you know, I guess that's just six emails. And then you get into my, into my regular newsletter after that. So you can find that on the, on the website as well. But yeah, go, go find me at podgetomers.com and hopefully you'll find a way to get onto my newsletter. We will link all of that. We will link all of that in the show notes. Yes, link it. Also, you can just email me a podgetsmallbusinessco.pilot.com. Like email me and say hi. I will respond. Thank you, Podge. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Common Shapes. Thank you again to Podge for coming on and talking so vulnerably and brilliantly about creative business and digital gardening and art making. Thank you to Softher Sound Studio for editing and podcast support to Jess Herrera for our podcast art and to Saltbreaker for our music. If you want to support the show download the Creative Ideation Portal. You can leave a five-star review on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Common Shapes. We'll see you next week Wednesday.