From the studio: January Update
Since I'm a huge lover of reading all things business related, I wanted to share some insights to what I'm doing behind the scenes. In this new series, I'll check in with myself every month to see what I'm doing and how I can make things awesome for my clients and myself. By making myself do monthly updates, I hope to get more clarity for myself about my work!
Current situation
I'm juggling a lot of different things:- I'm teaching art & costume design at two schools,
- teaching sewing workshops to different clients,
- making made-to-measure clothing for another set of clients,
- running Sew It Up Monthly together with Caroline,
- running Sew It Up together with Caroline.
- writing an e-book currently named "sewing translated"
Struggles
Coming in to this year, I made a list of things I want to accomplish. Now I notice that I want to get them all done in one month, which, of course is not going to happen. For now, what I need to learn is to focus on the task I'm actually doing, instead of thinking about 27 other things that need to get done too. I adopted this system of "one thing at a time" which forces me to write down all the ideas that pop up in a notebook and looking at them when the current project is finished. This definetly is a work in progress. I also notice that I'm feeling "in a hurry" quite often. I need to give myself the proper amount of time to get things done. I haven't found a schedule that acutally works for me every week. This is quite difficult and something that often leads to not knowing what to do when I actually have time at home to work. I need to think about a possible solution and put it in place.Successes
I managed to write down goals & put down some deadlines. It involved calendars, A3-sheets of paper, a lot of washi tape and a lot of post-its. Hurray for stationary. I've found myself an accountability partner in the form of Lieke. We will meet every 2 weeks and discuss what we want to accomplish in the next 14 days and what we accomplished in the past 14 days. We have our first meeting this Friday and we will put down some rules. I work well with deadlines, so knowing that I have to tell Lieke if I didn't accomplish something because I procrastinated will be painful to me! I landed a new series of workshops to teach where I can pick my own themes and dates. This will be awesome!February Focus
Most important for me is the 'focus' part. I need to make sure I actually pick 3 things I want to accomplish and make sure they get done. I often get distracted by a new shiny thing and tend to not finish the things I planned to do that day. So focus is my keyword for February!So, do you have any advice on staying focused or on routines to get productive when your life is quite hectic? Any things you are struggling with? Let me know in the comments!