Hey y’all 👋🏼 I hope you’ve been enjoying Sana’s Notes so far, if there is anything you’d like to hear about from me, just hit the Reply button and let me know! I hope you enjoy this week’s catch-up.

— Sana Tabassum

🍎 food for thought

Murphy’s law is something along the lines of ‘anything that can go wrong will go wrong’. It’s kind of how I’ve felt this past week. If you took a look at my calendar, you’d see that this would be an abnormally busy week in my life as a lot of events and meetings have ended up happening in the span of a few days. I knew I needed to keep my energy in check and make sure I’m equally resting and re-charging where possible.

I have two theories on why this week isn’t turning out as great as I expected. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. First - and the one that probably makes more sense - is that I’ve spread myself too thin both physically and mentally. It’s safe to say I’m having a bit of an identity crisis as I juggle several projects, ventures and opportunities. These all fall within three areas; my career, the platform I’ve built and its related opportunities and the biggest project I’ve worked on yet.

Second, is that I’ve had a terrible quality of sleep for the past couple of weeks and as a result, I’m not at 100%. My sleeping arrangements were slightly disrupted from having extended family over, and the early hours don’t sit well with me. I’m not going to list out each and every thing that went wrong this week or I think I’ll spiral. But in times like these I just tell myself ‘it is what it is, I just need to get through this week’.

If you’re going through something similar, I’d suggest you try and prioritise your wellbeing. Get proper sleep (I took a 2 hour nap yesterday) and listen to your body.

What I’ve learned 👇🏼

• even having accomplished a fair few things that I’m proud of, when it comes to finding a job I get a huge wave of imposter syndrome. It’s not easy being on the job hunt whilst also providing people with tips on how to do the same.

• Expect the possibility of things going wrong. Dont accept it or set yourself up for failure by only thinking of a bad outcome. Just expect that things can go either way and its not a bad thing.

• I need to learn how to say no without feeling guilty about it. This is something I’m working on, even in small ways like the language I use in emails or when I’m writing about myself.

🍗 content nuggets

I’ve been researching into the concept of pocketbooks and other ways of note-taking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for digital notes and methods of organising and filtering is magical. But I’ve never been able to stick to taking notes in a single place.

In the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, he talks about the ‘commonplace book’. An old method that philosophers and generally intelligent people used to keep their ideas with them at all times.

Although I’m not out and about every day, I wanted to give this a go since I have so many ideas and thoughts each day but no place to put them. I’ve ordered myself an A5 notebook for planning larger projects and a set of smaller A6 pocketbooks for on the go notes or random bits of ideas, phrases, references and so on.

When I was in architecture school, my sketchbook was the go-to place for any and everything about my design project, so in a similar way these notebooks can act as an outlet for those ideas. I’ve already started writing down lessons I’ve learnt from this past week.

I’m curious to know if you keep such a notebook? Let me know by replying to this email and any tips you might have for me.

🔥 on the back burner

I’m in the process of putting together a few handbooks on various topics, compiling some of my previous work and re-packaging it in a digestible format. Some of the topics include preparing for a crit, putting together your final design portfolio and writing an architecture essay. Let me know if this sounds like something you’d be willing to help give feedback for!

This weekend (fingers crossed 🤞🏼), I’ll also be sharing a new video on my channel about my drawing process for my final year architecture project and follow up with a full breakdown of my huge model as well. Make sure you’re subscribed!

— Sana x