Wedding

Writing Wedding “Thank You” Notes with Trello

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Find more ideas for thank you notes here: 6 tips for writing top-notch thank you notes after your wedding.

While I really enjoy writing thank you notes in general, when it comes to writing them in bulk… it can be a little overwhelming. There’s no shortage of etiquette guides for thank you notes for your wedding (these were my favorites), but it can be a bit harder to find tips on how to keep track of it all.

I used Trello to stay organized while I was writing my thank you notes, and it was really helpful! If you have a stack of thank you notes to write, I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. I’ve written up this guide based on my experience, but everyone works a little differently, so feel free to take what works for you and leave the rest.

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Wedding

6 tips for writing top-notch thank you notes after your wedding

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I typically try to post to my blog at least once each month, but I didn’t get around to it last month. I was too busy with a different writing endeavor: finishing off the thank you notes from my wedding.

After all of the excitement of the wedding and the honeymoon, writing thank you notes definitely felt like work. I admit I procrastinated, but I still managed to get them all in the mail just over a month after the wedding. Words cannot describe how happy I was when I dropped them off at the post office!

The weird thing about going through a wedding is that you gain all of this knowledge and experience, but, ideally, you’re never going to have to use it again. Since I will hopefully never need to write scores of thank you notes at once again, I’m sharing a few of the things I’ve learned here, in the hope that it might be helpful to someone else.

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Not Food

How I’m using technology to get more sleep

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The basic tenets of good sleep hygiene are pretty well established, but actually following through with them is a different story altogether. Sure, I know that I should stay away from screens before bedtime and go to bed and wake up around the same time each day, but actually having the discipline to follow that advice isn’t that easy.

Although some may say that technology is at least partly to blame for these problems in the first place, I’ve been able to use technology to help me get to bed on time. And while I definitely have room to improve in other areas of sleep hygiene, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far in case anyone is struggling with this.

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Professional

Are you happy at your job?

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Last year, the company that I work for was acquired. From the fact that I’m using the present tense “work” here, you can correctly conclude that the acquisition worked out fine, and I’m still happily employed at the same company. However, when the acquisition was first announced, I was definitely shaken up. I didn’t know what to expect. As I watched the changes unfolding around me, it was fascinating to observe how different everyone’s reactions to those changes were.

Having gone through this, there’s something that I would now recommend to anyone, whether or not you’re going through an acquisition, and that’s to decide how you’re going to measure your satisfaction with your job. This can be a challenge, but it’s important to figure out in advance. If you ever decide to leave your job, you don’t want that to be a rash decision, and if you decide to stay, that should be your choice, and not inertia keeping you somewhere where you’re unhappy.

There are lots of different ways that you can evaluate this, so I’ve just put together a few of my favorite techniques below. If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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Product

What makes a good product manager, from the perspective of the rest of a team

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Today marks 30 days in my new role as an associate product manager at Trello, coming from the support team. I’m working on a cross-functional team, alongside an experience product manager, and one of the first things I did when I started was to set up a 15 minute chat with each of my new teammates. I spent a few minutes just chatting with each person, a few minutes talking about their experience on the team, and then, at the end, I asked each one what they found to be helpful in a product manager.

While none of these are probably going to be shocking to an experienced product manager, I found it really interesting to hear the role described by people who work alongside product managers but don’t hold that role themselves. Here’s how my teammates described an ideal product manager:

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Spirituality, Woman Power

Remembering Tahirih on International Women’s Day

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When I remembered that today was International Women’s Day, I immediately thought of Tahirih.

Tahirih was a 19th century poet and religious scholar, renowned for both her beauty and her intelligence. She was one of the first followers of the Báb, the forerunner to Bahá’u’lláh (the founder of the Bahá’í Faith), and she’s one of the religion’s great heroines. She was ultimately executed for refusing to give up her faith, and I can never tell the story of her final words without tearing up: “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women!”

It’s not uncommon for Bahá’í parents to name their daughters after Tahirih, either as a first or middle name, and when I first became a Bahá’í, I actually felt a little jealous that I hadn’t been named after this impressive woman. But, as it turns out, I was. Sort of.

Let me explain.

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Food, Spirituality

How Instagram helped me develop a joyful attitude toward fasting

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Today is the first day of the Bahá’í month of fasting. The Bahá’í calendar is so awesome that it really deserves its own blog post, so I shall provide only a brief explanation here. The Bahá’í calendar consists of 19 months, with the final month spent fasting. During the fast, Bahá’ís abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset, making the arrival of the new year even more joyous.

This is my 11th year fasting, which is hard even for me to believe. The first year, I worried about everything. Then, after that, I found a breakfast that worked for me and ate it every day of the fast. That was typically oatmeal, Greek yogurt with berries, a hard-boiled egg, and half an apple sliced with peanut butter. It didn’t seem like a big deal to eat the same thing every day because, at that time, I ate the same thing every day for breakfast anyway: oatmeal in the winter and Greek yogurt in the summer.

But when you really love food, having only one meal that varies for three weeks gets a bit dull. So, in 2015, I decided to do things a little bit differently.

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Not Food, Professional

How I got my dream job

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I write to you from a small but stylish hotel room in New York. I’m here to spend a week in a Product Management course at General Assembly to prepare for my new role as an Associate Product Manager at Trello. Before this opportunity was announced, if you had asked me to write down exactly what I wanted to do next, it basically would have been this job description.

I haven’t always been this happy in my career. Just two years ago, I was pretty miserable. I was in a professional setting that was not a good environment for me, and I was just a few weeks away from being unemployed. I felt hopeless, without a chance of ever finding a better situation.

So I how did I go from despondent to dream job? Well, to be honest, it involved a lot of luck. But maybe there’s something in the story that can be of use to someone else, and with that hope in mind, here’s how it happened.

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