Too Many Tasks, Too Few Hands

Salut Les Amis! Quick message before we begin- I will be hosting a livestream on January 22nd, on my YouTube Channel to look back of the most highlight-worthy moments from 2023. I am really looking forward to this since I have so many highlight worthy moments to share. One of them being the fact that my newsletter is being read by almost 150 people and I feel so blessed and grateful for all of your support over the past year! Come to think of it, if I was in a room full of all my newsletter subscribers, I would be overwhelmed with joy and have the widest smile throughout the entire time! This livestream gives me a chance to thank all of you in person for all the love and kindness that people have expressed towards my newsletter and my latest release Raspberry Ripple! Also, I will be answering any questions that you may have so make sure to mark your calendars and say hi while you just finish your work on Monday and tune in! 😃 

More Hands, Please! Story of a Perpetual Juggler 😅 

As I begin to settle into my new role being fully remote, around lunch time is when I walk to this quaint little coffee shop, which inevitably turns into a grocery store run. On the way back, more often than not, I always tend to have more things than I can carry in my hands and I have figured out why this happens every time! The culprit of all my problems once again is MY PHONE. Do you agree?

My phone 💘 (basically my entire existence on the interwebs) has a permanent spot in one of my hands. It does not matter if I am scrolling through an article as I make my way through the aisles of the supermarket, while simultaneously checking off each item from my grocery list, it is always situated firmly in my hand.

This grocery list has a quirk of its own. No matter how early I make that list, it is certain that I leave out the one single item that I wanted in the first place.

Enter, another inanimate object that is always bugs me out. The shopping cart.

The shopping cart is a funny, shape shifting being that tends to fill up with items so quickly even when you have barely made it past the snacks aisle.

Putting the items in the cart, opening the doors to the freezers, pushing the cart and browsing through all the nutritional information on the back of packets are all responsibilities that are assigned to my “free” hand. The other hand being permanently “occupied” holding on dearly to my key to the world (the phone) and I must say doing an excellent job at it. I wonder why grocery shopping as adults is overwhelming. 🙄

Once checked out, the grocery bags will obviously need both my hands due to the sheer number of “surprise” items that made their way into the shopping cart in the first place. I don’t own a car yet so I am not privy to the luxury of putting all the bags in the trunk and off I go! But even if I did, there is another set of trick questions waiting for me at the entrance to my apartment building. Now why would I think this would be easy. I know.

At this instant, I am holding 2 grocery bags, a cute tote bag which is an absolute necessity while stepping out, where I am faced with the dilemma of trying to find the keys to my apartment. The conceirage folks have a history of being absent from their front desk spot as soon as they hear me step foot inside the building and therefore I need my key FOB (frequency operated button) to be present AT ALL TIMES, reminding me of ID badges when you badge into office each time you step out of your “designated zone”. The key fob places a barrier to entry in 3 different points, one of them even being inside the elevator. Throughout this ordeal of using my key FOB to open the door, I need to put all the bags down, press the key fob, grab all my bags again, and enter before the door shuts me out (which has happened multiple times). And it is at times like these when I think to myself, if there is just one thing that would make all of this easier and that is, you guessed it, it is my wish for another pair of hands. Phew! 😄 I knew I had to write about this every day spectacle the minute I began fumbling for my keys at the door yesterday. If you have funny grocery shopping stories, I would love to hear them out too! 😄

Moving on from the semi agitated rant about not having enough hands, there is a lot brewing on the back end of my content creation journey. I spent most of the month of December 2023 reflecting on my YouTube Channel, Newsletter and Podcast, I have come to some incredibly insightful conclusions. I have finally managed to put all of my thoughts into buckets that can be packaged easily and delivered in the best possible way. Here is a 10,000 foot view of what you can expect in 2024.

YouTube Channel 🎥 - Longform Guitar Playthoroghs, Mix Breakdowns, Live Streams (loads of them), Answering Specific Questions related to roadblocks in creativity, songwriting and the promotional side of being an independant artist. The pivot is due to longform videos having a long turnaround time and at this point, I just want to focus on adding value and not so much on how the content is packaged. Yay, more live streams! ☺️

Podcast 🎧️ - Ameya’s Monthly Podcast for the forseeable future will be exclusively hosted on Spotify. Owing to an excellent feature on Spotify that allows me to create my own personalized style radio show with Spotify Music+Talk Episodes, these short 15-minute episodes will go over the history of the featuring songs, interesting facts about the artists/ band and anecdotes on how I discovered them. If you’d like to check out my latest episode published in Dec 2023, click here! 🥰

Newsletter 📚️ - My newsletter is something that will always be special for me. It will continue to remain my most curated and true reflection of my personal thoughts/essays or learning experiences that I would like to share with all of you! And I would love to hear your thoughts as there is so much out there to learn. So feel free to share a fact, an incident or anything that catches your eye and you find incredibly interesting! It surely will make my day! 😊

Quote of the week 🍀 

Current Favorites! ❤️

Book: The E-myth Revisited: This book is really helping me identify the path forward in terms of operating as a business owner. There are 3 main mindsets that are discussed with case studies throughout this book and it has been an absolute gamechanger in the way I approach my content creation journey. If you’d like to read my book summaries, follow this link! 😁 

Podcast: Finally getting back to my daily French listening with Little Talk in Slow French. My French comprehension capabilities are slightly below the level that is needed to understand everything that being talked about in each episode, but the host, Nagisa Morimoto provides subtle cues to make it slightly easier. Though slightly leaning on the advanced French speaking side, I would highly recommend this podcast if learning a new language is part of your 2024 resolutions! 🥰 

Song: Tough to pick one but if I had to pick one, I would have to pick Drop D by Matteo Mancusso. This song has me absolutely HOOKED. This maybe one of those songs that inspire the sound of all my future work and as monumental as it may seem, it is very difficult to reach the technical expertise. If you would like to listen to more in depth analysis of songs and some of my absolute favorites curated into my own personal radio-show-esque format, give this episode of Spotify Music+Talk a listen! 🎵 😁 

I hope you have a great week and are having great start to the new year! 🥰 

Ameyaxoxo

For tour/song release/press and merch enquiries - kindly reach out via www.ameyaxoxo.com