How To Be More Productive in Your Creative Business
I used to think having a tight schedule was very boring. I thought that the reason I had set up my freelance fashion design business was to have less rules, not more. I was mad. Here’s a simple guide to mastering the art of productivity as a creative business owner.
We all have the same amount of time and yet every freelance fashion design business owner I speak to wishes they had more. They want to create more time to get out of the studio and travel, they want more time to market themselves better so that they can attract the kind of clients they really want to work with and some want to build a business that they can pass down to their creative kids.
What is good time management?
Good time management as a creative business owner is the ability to do the things you need to do in order to make the amount of money you want to make and have time left over to enjoy life outside of work. That’s why you created a freelance fashion design business, right? It’s also being able to make quick decisions and not procrastinate over things that really don’t need laser focus accuracy; the ability to identify which 20% of actions will produce the most effective results.
It’s also understanding what works for you. Setting up fancy systems because you read it somewhere is a recipe for overwhelm. The apps, tips and tricks are only good if they work for you. Here is the system that I currently use. It’s not perfect, yet it works for me. I'm a creative business owner, not a techy and I really want to spend as much time away from the computer as I possibly can.
Review
A yearly, and quarterly review is a good place to start as a creative business owner. If it’s midyear when you are reading this, just begin with a monthly or weekly review and pencil out a date in the diary in December for you to spend an afternoon to review what went well in the previous 12 months (and celebrate that), what was challenging (and what you learnt) and then how you want to take that learning into the next 12 months.
It’s wise to do that last part on a different day, say the first week of January. Think about this as the pre season strategy meeting you used to attend and get really frustrated with, since it was all about boring numbers and nothing about creativity. Well if you have the passion and guts to grow your freelance fashion design business you need to be looking at the numbers if you want to earn more, work less and spend more time with those you love.
Task Management Apps
Think of Asana, Trello and all the other task management apps as your virtual assistant, reminding you what to do as a creative business owner. You break the bigger projects eg ‘create a newsletter’ into smaller tasks eg. research costs of Convertkit, choose the name of the newsletter, create a weekly writing habit. It sounds obvious yet when we look at a big task it can feel too much, especially if it’s new to us, so a simple process of how to do them broken down into steps is best.
Put big stuff you know needs doing e.g. 'tax return’ in there too then add times and dates and the app will then send you a notification. Again break it down into bite sized chunks.
This is also good for the small daily things like marketing activities or less frequent tasks like checking in with clients and asking for a testimonial at the end of a project or setting a regular date for quarterly and monthly reviews. This is important as a way of switching off; if you know you’ve done the client generating tasks, you can ‘go home’.
As you grow if you have these big, small and daily tasks written down as a step by step process you can then hand over unimportant parts to a VA. If it’s all in your head, you can’t. NB I would never advise handing over your marketing to a VA, its the lifeblood of your business.
Apple iphone Notes
There are loads of apps like Evernote yet as a creative business owner I like to keep my costs low and my profits high. It’s easy to buy into a shiny new app and never use it. Iphone notes are free and so I choose to learn a bit more each day about how these work. I use this for working on the go.
I have a link to my Calendly on there so I can copy and paste when I’m chatting in my DM’s. I have packing lists for work trips, girly weekends and a week in the sun. I have a shopping list for food store basics (monthly) and then daily fresh stuff and shopping lists of my go to recipes. I use the tick box feature and have one note with all the stuff I buy or pack regularly. That way I can tick them on/off don’t have to rewrite the whole list and take up mental energy and time re-inventing the wheel every time..
You can use iphone notes for jotting down ideas for social media posts to grow your freelance fashion design business. Get into the habit of taking 5 minutes after you have finished a call with a client. What questions came up? What feelings and challenges did they talk about? This is gold and part of understanding what your ideal client is thinking, feeling, saying and doing. Write it down and keep it safe to spark content marketing ideas.
Iphone notes have a folder system and a brilliant hashtag feature so that you can group your notes by a common theme, just like if you searched for a hashtag on Instagram or LinkedIn.
Whiteboard
Technology is meant to be helping us be more efficient yet it can be the thief of time when you open your phone or laptop. Distraction is everywhere, especially with the overthinking brain of a creative business owner, so a whiteboard is arguably the best piece of kit for your productivity because it gets you away from time drainers. It’s basic, it's primal, it’s simple. I use these magic whiteboards on a roll as they are portable and I have a tiny city apartment so I can pull them down when I don’t want my work around me and I can put them in my laptop bag when I’m travelling and working.
Start on a Sunday and plan the week, no more than 30 minutes. Look at your Asana or Trello and see the things that you want to get done; the small things you do each day in your freelance fashion design business that shift the big thing. If you want a sustainable business marketing ought to be on there; so regular posting to LinkedIn could be on there, and connecting with potential clients would also be on there. Set an amount and then put circles, tally marks or anything that is big and visual and put it somewhere you will see it every morning. Mine is above my toaster. Cross these tasks off with that big marker.
Remember, you are a creative business owner, so make it fun. Draw a smiley face, be a kid and add a ‘whoop whoop!’ each time you do it. Listen to an uplifting track. My current fave is “Celebrate by Kool & The Gang” - yep, love it. At the end of each day look at your whiteboard. Celebrate the stuff you did and give yourself empathy for the things you didn’t. Then commit to doing 1% better tomorrow.
Spend 5-10 mins max making a plan for tomorrow, the social media post, the follow up email that’s gonna have a positive impact on your freelance fashion design business, but do this considering all the stuff that’s going on in your life e.g. I write down what I’m gonna eat, so I don’t have to think about it and I put an outfit out so I don’t spend ages the next day getting dressed!
Notebooks
It’s not good for anyone to be on a digital device late at night so if you are wanting to do some CEO style big thinking work or deep inner work this is the place to do it. I use Leuchtturm1917 lined notebooks. I use these to jot things down in my calls with my own business coach, in business meetings, at workshops etc.
The absolute game changer is that these notebook pages are all numbered so that every time you finish a page you can create an index at the front so that you are never again searching through a notebook to find “that really great thing” you wrote down. You can then use these notes when in Asana to create a more solid system with reminder emails. I have a colour code; black for my business and colours for my journal.
Post it notes
Post It notes are great for that creative hit that comes to you; in the shower, cooking dinner, etc. You could play with post it notes on a calendar to create a ‘straw’ version before putting it into your online calendar. I have them in the kitchen drawer and write down my bits and bobs and then transfer them to my more structured system when I’m back at work.
What is important here is not to beat yourself up that you ‘forgot’, ‘don’t have time’ etc etc and accept that you’ll write this down and deal with it later. It’s these small moments when our mind drags us into negative thinking that has a huge impact on our time. Remember you are a creative business owner, a human being, living in a crazy world and you are likely navigating a lot of changes going on in your midlife mind. Be kind to you.
Moon Cycles & Mental Fitness
If you’re not into ancient wisdom, or new age science, skip this section. I have been tracking the moon cycles and using the themes of the New and Full moon for many years now. I have grown as a creative business owner, mum and midlife woman using the power of this practice.
What the hell has this got to do with productivity? The reality is that the biggest positive impact on your time is your mind. If you imagine your thoughts as light, floating all around you; when light is beamed into a laser focus it can cut through metal. Now imagine if you could laser focus your thoughts; this is how your inner world, your thoughts and emotions have a direct impact on your productivity. Spirit Daughter and Lunar Living are two resources I use, and if you were to start with a New Moon journal practice answering the questions, with a focus on your business, very slowly over time you could see a positive impact on your time, mood, emotions and spiritual growth.
Mental fitness works in a similar way in that it slowly rewires your thought patterns that have been sabotaging you as a creative business owner for years. Even with the most robust productivity plan, your thoughts, if left to run wild, drag you around from one thing to another and that’s when you get to the end of the day wondering where the time has gone.
As you grow your freelance fashion design business you will be pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, just like a seed cracks open. As the seedling grows it experiences new challenges along the way, and in order to grow it has to adapt. When marketing your business in a new way, you are growing and adapting and if your brain doesn’t grow at the same speed it sabotages your productivity and progress. It takes 8 weeks to rewire your thought patterns and if you want to learn more about this, Positive Intelligence is a great place to start.
Midlife & Productivity
It’s funny how we manage to get everything done in our freelance fashion design business when the kids are little. We just seem to make it happen if it’s to please and take care of others, yet when it’s for our own dreams and goals it’s different; we have been conditioned to feel bad if we are less than the perfect mum, wife and caregiver.
You have to unlearn looking after others and relearn looking after you. Midlife is not a time to be getting pis**d off with your lack of productivity, it’s a natural change to your body and mind. If you want to support that and your role as a creative business owner you need to be proactive in your productivity plans.
Systems take time to build. You are a company of one, so the good news is you can build a way of working that works just for you. Remember those archaic systems and processes you had to abide by when you were employed? The slow computers, the colleagues who just could not file things away properly to save their life? You now get to do WTF you like, yet only if you build a really robust plan.
Remember to build your systems slowly over time and don’t take weeks to plan an elaborate system as a way to avoid what really needs to be done. Start with a small system of activities that bring you better clients, because when you get the better paying clients, you will instantly create more time.
