 Hello and welcome back to my channel. This is part two of my attempt to sync my writing with my period. If you want to learn more about the goals behind this experiment, please check out part one. I will have a link in the description for you. Other than that, let's move on to the luteal phase of my menstrual cycle. From here, the next phase is the luteal phase. Now that is 10 to 14 days and it's from after you ovulate and before you start to menstruate. The strengths in terms of mental strengths and creativity are completion, nurturing and some of the bullet points here are a desire to get things done, focus on detail driven responsibilities, slow down networking and outside meetings and focus on administrative tasks. So when I think about my day job, it's fairly easy to think of administrative style things like that's creating tasks and following up on things and just reporting, you know, getting all of the stuff done that doesn't require creative energy. When it comes to being an author for writing specifically, I think this would include proof reading and really detail driven editing as opposed to like structural or developmental style editing. When it comes to the author platform business part of the equation, I think this would include things like making sure all of my youtube videos have the correct tags or tidying up HTML on your website if you do that yourself or if you have an email list cleaning it inactive subscribers. Now given the stage I'm at in my journey, the only thing I can think of is like going through my youtube videos and making sure all the descriptions are okay and that sort of thing but I generally I try to stay on top of that when I'm publishing them so there's nothing really to catch up on and the other thing is obviously I don't have anything that's ready for editing. I have powerless which I can read but I want to save that for the menstrual phase because that's when you're supposed to be evaluating. So I don't think that fits in with the administrative detail driven tasks. So I need to have a think about how the strengths of this stage apply to my current experience level as an author and the things I have on. If you have any ideas of the things an author could be focusing on in this phase or any of the phases actually please leave them in a comment below because I might be missing things. Obviously I'm not an experienced author so there are probably things I haven't even thought of so please let me know your thoughts and when I try this again next month I can try incorporating some of your ideas as well. Hello and welcome to the menstrual phase of my cycle aka my period. It has actually been a month since I last filmed and the reason for that is because I knew that the strength of this phase is evaluating and taking stock so it's a lower energy time in your phase. In terms of workouts Alyssa actually says in her book a nap is a valid workout so it's a time when you're supposed to you know cuddle up and take time to reflect. So the mental strength of this phase is evaluating and taking stock and I thought as a writer this would be the perfect time to review a draft from a macro perspective so to figure out where their characters work motivations overall plot and so on and because I have a draft sitting in a drawer powerless I thought this would be the perfect time to review that. However one month ago it was the start of Camp NaNoWriMo when I was starting a new project and I felt like because that new project was so new I couldn't risk getting distracted by my old one and getting sucked back into my old one. So now it's been a month I'm on my period again I've had a good month of focusing on that project I feel like I'm as settled into it as I'm going to be so today I'm going to be reviewing powerless. The other thing I want to do today is evaluate something in my personal slash professional life I do have a potential job opportunity I haven't mentioned this before because I've been in the interview process but this week they're checking two references and I have my third and final interview so I'm fairly sure I'm going to get an offer and I just need to figure out whether I actually wanted or not because I think when you're interviewing for something it's very easy to fall into the trap of selling yourself on it because you're so busy selling everyone that's interviewing you you're so busy putting yourself into the position of yes I'm the best candidate yes I'm a good fit yes I can do all of this that it's easy to lose sight of whether or not you actually want the opportunity so I think today would be a good day to also do some journaling around that and just figure out where I stand before the next interview comes up. Now because it has been a month I have actually had another cycle of writing and working and knowing what the theoretical strengths are of each phase of my cycle and in my camp nano-rimo tracking spreadsheet I actually added a column to it which listed which phase I was in at that time so I thought I'd give a quick recap of what I've noticed over the past month since I last filmed so the beginning of April was my menstrual phase and during that time I really struggled to get into writing this new book reciprocal stalking and in my tracking spreadsheet I can see that I spent four days during that phase attempting to write and I didn't achieve that much so my lowest words per minute session was 12.98 words my best one was 31.8 and I think sort of high 20s low 30s is a decent session it's not beating any records but that's like a good productive session and there was only one session like that during that week I remember really struggling to do more than 15 minutes at a time and I just yeah I just felt like I didn't know the book well enough yet to get started interestingly I did have a session during that week that I've just listed as sorting out thoughts which is the sort of activity that does fit perfectly into the menstrual phase because that's when you're evaluating and figuring things out so all in all it was the first week at the project I don't think that helped in terms of writing but it's also interesting to note that this was not the week when my communication and producing skills were at their highest and that seems to show in the writing results the next phase after that was the follicular phase now the follicular stage is when you're supposed to be like planning and looking ahead so also potentially not the right stage for writing but more of a production type of week so getting stuff done week rather than a reflective week than the previous one and I think that shows because every day in this phase I did write whereas the previous phase I did take days off interestingly this phase was also when I had my best and my worst writing session in terms of efficiency for the whole month so the best one was 44.65 words a minute I did 1027 words in 23 minutes and the worst session was 4.56 words a minute which was 251 words in 55 minutes now unfortunately because life happens and other experiments happen this is not a controlled experiment it's not like I was attempting to do the same activities at the same time each day and seeing how they changed throughout the cycle I probably should have done that to make this a more valid experiment however unless you're actually in a lab it's very hard to switch life on and off and to um stop doing other things so what's interesting about this phase is that I started my trying to write every day at 6am experiment and that's when that really really bad day happened I think it was day it was Wednesday so it was day three of the week so I think that's more something that can be attributed to that experiment rather than the phase of my cycle the next phase was the ovulatory phase and this is supposed to be the highest energy part of the cycle and the time when your communication and collaboration is at its strongest so in Alyssa's book this is when she talks about having meetings as well as writing blog posts and marketing material when it comes to being a writer this is obviously the week when your writing should be at its peak in my case this was the highest word count phase to date so the number of words I wrote during this phase were 6275 whereas the previous one was 5453 and previously in my menstrual phase I only did 3939 so you can see it going up each week having said that 6 000 words and some change isn't actually a lot of words especially when you compare it to the amount I've written in the past when it comes to activities that day I did actually write every day again in terms of writing efficiency in this phase it did vary quite a bit the lowest days were 16 words a minute and the highest day was 28.86 words a minute so around the good average productive time then we get into the luteal phase this is when even though your energy might be high at the beginning of the phase it does start to slow down it's usually a good time to focus on administrative type tasks in my case this was also when the interview process started really picking up so I had my first interview for this role on the 20th and then after that I had seven days to do a whole lot of assignments for them so most of my creative energy was going towards these assignments so because of that I only ended up writing for four days during that stage in my cycle that might have been because of my cycle because your energy does start going down but I think it was more because there was this big thing happening in my life that was taking my creative energy for those writing sessions though I had another 28.25 word one and then the lowest one was 13.17 so throughout the entire month I fluctuated significantly based on my writing efficiency I tried many different tools to get my writing done but all in all I don't think there was a strong correlation between my cycle phases and the amount I was able to produce for camp nanorimoh so now that that review is covered let's look at powerless I'm more than a little nervous about this I've just finished reviewing powerless and it actually took me a lot longer than I was expecting I mean and who would have thought reading books takes time but I started around I think 9 30 this morning after I filmed this little intro and now it's coming up to 330 and I did take a one hour break to go for a walk but other than that that means you know five hours of reading so there's an actual book there I'm not sure how that didn't quite click but I thought it would be a one or two hour thing in terms of my effectiveness reviewing it I have no idea if my evaluation skills were better because of this time in my cycle I'm also not sure if what I did could be considered evaluating because I was rereading it for the first time and maybe this time the cycle would actually be better for after I've already reread it and I start going through it with not a fine truth comb because detail work is better in the luteal phase but maybe doing exercises like the story clock to map out the story so far and see at a macro level if it needs to be reworked but all in all I was pleasantly surprised by the experience and I've covered that in another video so if that video is out before this one I will include a link in the description below now I'm going to have a break and later tonight or maybe tomorrow night I'll evaluate the potential job offer that's coming up and see how I go it has now been two months since I started this experiment so I've been monitoring and observing how my performance aligns with the activities I should be working on in each phase of my cycle for two cycles now and what I've noticed is that in certain phases I do pretty consistently want to do the types of things that Alyssa outlines in her book so in the follicular phase I wanted to do brainstorming idea generation type of stuff I wanted to do planning I would randomly think of new video ideas during my work day and want to get to the end of the day so I could outline them the same thing happened with ideas for scenes in my book and that didn't actually happen at other points in the cycle or at least it didn't happen spontaneously in my luteal phase when your energy starts going down I did find that I wanted to do more administrative type of work I did find I was going back through youtube videos seeing if I could optimize the tags or I would be editing videos where I already had footage ready to go but hadn't gotten onto it yet and then in the menstrual phase I only really looked at this in the second month because as I mentioned earlier in this video in the first month I was starting a new project and my goal for that phase was to reread powerless and I didn't want to do that at the beginning of a new project so a few days ago when I did have my period and I was focusing on more evaluation type activities what was really interesting was that I noticed that I naturally stayed in the evaluation phase so I don't know if reading through my book was the best activity for this because I wasn't so much evaluating I was just rediscovering after so long but I also mentioned that I was potentially going to get a job offer and I was going back and forth about whether it was the right move for me so I'd already been thinking about it for a couple of days and then I did some journaling and ended up with I think four or five pages of just general rambling and pro and cons list and trying to position the decision in terms of what I gain versus what I lose I also scheduled a coaching session with a friend of mine who's a coach to help go through the decision I had a lengthy conversation with my mum about it so what's interesting is that in the past I've always been someone who makes decisions fairly quickly and I don't know if this is just an age thing where I have less optimism about things working out well or if it's because I was in this phase of my cycle but it was interesting to see how long I just kept going through the options and considering them from different angles and honestly I don't know if I've ever considered any decision in this much depth before so that could potentially be because I was doing it at the right time in my cycle for that sort of deep thought and in case you're wondering at the time of recording this video nothing's been finalized yet I did have the final interview I am expecting an offer it will probably come through either today or on Monday but not in time for me to give you any heads up in this video the one phase where that didn't seem to happen was the ovulatory phase so this is the phase where your energy is meant to be at its highest in your strengths are communication and collaboration so I would have expected high energy and desire to be writing and doing videos and that didn't really happen like I did videos but I don't feel like my writing was any better in either at the cycles when I was looking at this beyond enthusiasm for tasks I also wanted to look at energy and my performance so in terms of energy I do definitely feel much better than I did at the start of the year when I listened to that interview I don't know if it's because of the flow protocol it could be because the days are getting much lighter so there's much more sun it could be because at the time of recording this outro I've been working from home for seven or eight weeks now I think so even though things have been busy at work there is slightly less energy expanded when you're not physically going to the office it's also easier to take it easier when you can lie on the couch in the middle of a working day or go for a walk in the forest in terms of performance there is nothing to indicate that I did certain tasks better at any point in the cycle other than the fact that I did enjoy certain tasks at different points in the cycle so even though this was an interesting experiment and I probably am going to continue just to observe where I am in the cycle and what I'm working on and how it's going I don't think I really achieve my goals of becoming you know the ultimate superhuman Jackie writer who can do everything perfectly at any time and there are a couple of reasons for that one is obviously this wasn't a controlled experiment I wasn't living perfectly in each stage of the cycle for example I bought groceries for one stage of the cycle and then I moved into the next stage I wasn't going to throw out that food just because it wasn't the recommended food for the next stage so my diet wasn't always perfect my exercise wasn't always perfect because gyms are closed at the moment it is hard to do certain things like weight and resistance training in terms of activities as I've mentioned I do have a full-time job and that job isn't synced with my cycle there have been a lot of emergency communications over the past couple of months and they happen at any point in the week and any point in the month regardless of what my period thinks I should be doing I still need to manage a team every week even though there's only one time of the month when communication is at its strongest I still need to do reporting and approve invoices and that happens usually there's a bit of that every week as well and admittedly in some cases I might be able to structure things a bit more around my period but in general I think when you're working for someone else it is really hard to align things into a four-week cycle rather than going week by week so obviously because I wasn't following the protocol properly it is very hard to assess results but that then raises potential issues with the protocol now in theory I love the idea that there's a female hormonal cycle and that we can organize our lives to get the most out of it but the fact is even though that may be the ideal approach we do still live in a society that runs on a 24-hour cycle or even a week by week cycle rather than a monthly cycle and that can make it a little bit hard to organize things optimally unless you do happen to work for yourself so if you're a full-time writer then I can see how this might work though it might take a few months to get set up and what I mean by that is if I use YouTube as an example in the follicular phase that would be when I'm planning out my videos your violatory phase is when I would be recording the videos the luteal phase is when I'd be doing all of the uploading and optimizing and then the menstrual phase would be when I go through the last month of videos and go okay what worked and what didn't now if you're doing videos week by week you're either going to have to like really cram in a bunch of videos to get that onto a monthly cycle or you're going to have to take a few weeks off for the times when you're not in the recording phase when it comes to writing it might be similar so the follicular phase would be brainstorming and plotting the ovulatory phase would be when you're actually doing a lot of writing and a lot of producing the luteal phase might be when you're looking at contracts or doing copy edits and then the menstrual phase might be when you're doing more developmental style work now in order for that to work you do need multiple projects on the go so you can have one at each stage you also need to be able to produce enough in the ovulatory phase which is about five days I think that it doesn't matter that you're focusing on other things for the other 25 days of the month and that might be possible because the things you're doing in the other 25 days are supporting you being as productive as possible in those five days however if you're not doing it full time I think it would be very risky to set up your writing schedule like that because because you're really not giving yourself a lot of time to write when you're already in a situation where your writing time is being eaten up by other things like work and family and friends and exercise and so on so with all of that in mind how do I see myself using this in future I think it's a helpful tool just for evaluating whether you're on track or not so if you notice that something's going really well I think it's interesting to have this as a reference so if I notice I'm coming up with a lot of random ideas and brainstorming I can look at the my flow app and go oh okay I'm in my follicular phase that's why and that makes sense and since this is going well why don't I spend a lot more time on this by the same token if something isn't going well and you're really pushing and pushing and your energy is low and you can't figure out why you can check the app and go oh I'm in my luteal phase this week that's why I should be focusing on more detail stuff and instead I'm trying to do this big picture creative stuff and no wonder it's not working maybe I should put this off until next week so all in all I don't think it's practical to organize your whole life around this at least I don't think it's practical for me to organize my whole life around this but I do think it's useful to have this information in my toolkit when it comes to figuring out how to be a better and more sustainable writer so from here please let me know what you thought if you are a menstruating woman are you someone who has noticed that there are certain ebbs and flows throughout the month or certain things that you're more effective at at different times in the month and how do you manage your time around that please let me know because I'm curious to hear what you think other than that I will see you next time bye