The year is 365 days long (366 this year because it's a leap year!). Here's your reminder that a year is a marathon. You don't have to sprint out the gate in January and do all the things or make all the changes - because guess what? That's not realistically feasible - and it's also not sustainable. Let's talk about embracing your natural rhythms, your business's slow and busy periods and why you need to make it a priority to check in with your data regularly!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
The year is 365 days long (366 this year because it's a leap year!). Here's your reminder that a year is a marathon. You don't have to sprint out the gate in January and do all the things or make all the changes - because guess what? That's not realistically feasible - and it's also not sustainable. Let's talk about embracing your natural rhythms, your business's slow and busy periods and why you need to make it a priority to check in with your data regularly!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Speaker 1:
Hello everyone and welcome to what I don't know if this is going to be a bonus episode for subscribers or if this is going to be the January episode for subscribers, but I had something come into my head today and I thought I would share it with all of you in case it helps you as you embark on a brand new year. So before I jump into that, of course, I just want to say thank you to all of you for subscribing to and financially supporting the podcast. It means a lot. We had another new supporter join us this month, so that's really exciting and I am thrilled to have you all here. So, on that note, let's talk about this thought that jumped into my head this morning.
Speaker 1:
So this morning I was working in my planner. It is my CEO day for the month and this is something that I have done. This is the third year I've done this in my business. I sit down at the beginning of the year and I plot out all my CEO days, my research days and my studio closures for the year, and the reason I started doing this is because I realized I was kind of always scrambling and I also wasn't being particularly intentional in my business and I also wasn't always on top of my numbers and actually knowing if I was making any money, like I mean, I knew I was making revenue but I didn't know if I was actually making money to take home profit. So I decided I really needed to sit down once a month and focus on working on my business instead of in my business. We hear that saying all the time, but it's very true and you really do need to kind of remove yourself regularly from your business and look at it from way up in the clouds and see what's going on. And for me, that meant instituting CEO days. So I go in in January and I book them in my planner first week of January they're always the first Monday of the month and I block those days out so that I don't have any excuses for double booking on my CEO days. And I have been doing like I said. I've been doing this for this is the third year I've done this and it's been super helpful for me in my business.
Speaker 1:
And I will actually just tell you a funny story, because I didn't do my December CEO day because it was December. It was crazy. I was just finishing up market season, my dog had passed away. There was some family health things going on and it was just it was bananas. And so I just crossed out my CEO day and figured I would do it at the end of the year. When I did my year end and all that stuff and yeah, like I was still looking at my numbers, the daily sales, and I had a good idea of what invoicing I would be doing at the end of the month for clients and so I kind of thought I have a handle on this.
Speaker 1:
And then at the end of December, I sat down to do my invoicing and to look at all my sales for the month and going through and just looking at all my numbers, and I realized I was $600 short from my 2023 gross revenue goal and I was so annoyed with myself. I mean, on the one hand, I was really happy because I set myself an ambitious goal this year and I've set myself another ambitious goal for next year because I'm still a long ways away from making a reasonable income that can support a single person with no other help income wise. So I have a long ways to go, but it was a big percent increase from last year. So I mean I did great. I'm very pleased with myself. I'm very pleased with everything I was doing, but $600, y'all $600.
Speaker 1:
And if I had sat down and done my CEO day in December, I would have realized it would. I would have flagged it, I would have seen that I was very close but not quite there, and I could have made adjustments into how I did things for the last three and a half weeks of the year and probably hit that $600 gap that I was missing. And so this is why CEO days are so important, and this episode isn't about CEO days, but it kind of relates to what I'm going to talk about in a second. This is why it's so important to know your numbers. This is why it's so important to check in with what's going on in your business regularly, because if you don't, you really don't have any clue where you're at. If I had been paying attention, I would have caught it, and so, yes, this is why it's important to track and to keep checking in and to be an active participant in what's happening in your business so that you can make these adjustments, because sometimes it's just a small adjustment that can get you on the right track. I mean, honestly, to earn an extra $600 in December would not have required any massive changes to what I was doing. It just would have required a little bit more of a concentrated effort. So, yeah, that's why it's important to make time for these, and so this is what I do.
Speaker 1:
The first week of December, like I said, I sit down and I plot all my CEO days for the year into my calendar. I also plot research days in every month, and this is for me. I kind of suffer from shiny object syndrome and it often sends me off on tangents that aren't productive. I mean, sometimes they are, but a lot of the time they're not and I waste a lot of time. So what I started doing is booking a research day. It's usually the last Friday of the month, and Fridays are days that I don't book anything in my calendar. I keep those empty for me. I usually do work, but if I don't want to work I don't have to. So research days are kind of fun days, and anytime a shiny object comes my way, I just stop.
Speaker 1:
I have a spot in my planner for I call it my brain dump section and I just jot it down there. I have one for every month of the year, and then, when research day comes around, I go back to that list of shiny objects and I look to see which one still interests me Heads up. Most of them don't, because they're just that, they're shiny objects that really are not useful. But the ones that do, I sit down and I research them a little more in depth and find out what's involved and if it's something that I want to do or if I don't want to do. So that's helped me keep my focus. So I book those in there.
Speaker 1:
And the last thing that I book this week is I book my studio closures for the year, and I have a studio closure every quarter, so it's usually the last week of the quarter, except for December when I book the last two weeks of the quarter. So these are not vacations although I can take a vacation during those weeks but they're just weeks where I close my studio to all the noise. So I don't talk to clients, I don't talk to potential podcast guests, I don't get wrapped up in social media. These are the weeks where I set aside time to catch up on any projects that are outstanding with clients or I dive deeper into what's the word I want to use for these projects that relate directly to my businesses but that aren't client facing. So things that I need to do to grow, but I need some concentrated time to work on them without distractions. So I set those aside. I also, during those weeks, kind of have an easier week, so I give myself a little bit more time in the morning. If I want to go out in the middle of the afternoon to do something, particularly during gardening season, I don't feel guilty about it. They're just an easy week for me to kind of get work done and feel accomplished, but at the same time I don't feel any pressure, I don't feel rushed. It's just a week of calm, focused work. I guess is the best way to describe it. So those go into my calendar right away.
Speaker 1:
And as I was doing all this, I was listening to Instagram, real or story, I can't remember, maybe it was TikTok, anyway, it was a video of somebody who was doing their first day in their new 2024 planner and they had about 15 or 20 habit trackers that they were doing. And if you're not a planner person, habit trackers are where you create a grid or a graph of some kind to check off each day that you hit a specific habit. So maybe your habit is to go for a walk five out of seven days a week. So you create a little grid for yourself. You check off each day that week that you go for a walk and anyway, it's a lot of tracking. It's not my thing, that doesn't work for me. If it works for you, fantastic. But I just realized, like how many of those habits is that person still going to be doing Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now?
Speaker 1:
And it made me think about all the pressure we put on ourselves to completely change who we are in January. And I think what I just want to remind you all of is that the year is a marathon, it's not a sprint. You don't need to accomplish all your goals in Q1 or in January. You can spread things out, and that's where sitting down with your planner can be really helpful is realizing that, hey, it doesn't all have to go in January. You can put some of it in February, you can put some of it in April, you can put some of it in September. There's a long way to go before the end of the year. We are just in week one and our businesses don't turn into new businesses overnight and we don't turn into new people overnight.
Speaker 1:
And I remembered hearing this from a podcaster that I listened to. She's a coach, a business coach, and she mentioned this a long time ago in a podcast that I was listening to, about how so many of her clients that she takes on when they sit down to work on a three month plan, she notices this with virtually every single client. They top load the first month with everything, and then there's a few things in the second month and then they come to her and say I don't know what to put in month three. I'm going to get it all done in two months. And she has to sit them down and make them realize that all those things you said you were going to get done in month one, you're not going to get them done. You need to spread them out. You need to be more realistic about your time. You need to think about your time. You need to think a little more strategically, because you're just going to burn yourself out and I thought that this would be a good time to remind everybody of that. You're not going to get everything done this month or next month or in Q1. And so sit down and think about your natural rhythms.
Speaker 1:
When, what times of the year, are you most productive? For a lot of people, winter, which is what we're in right now, is not a productive season. It's a season of hibernation, it's a season of recovery. It's a season of being dormant. All you have to do is look outside your window to see what happens in winter. The rest of nature gets it. The rest of nature lets go of things. They bunker down, they hibernate, they take a rest, they store up energy for the coming spring when things get really busy. All things are going because spring and summer are all about fresh beginnings and growth. A lot of growth happens in those seasons and we carry on through all of that. Summer is about maturity, and then we get to October and fall and it's about letting go and preparing for winter and all of that stuff. So think about how you work. Maybe December is when you are naturally more productive.
Speaker 1:
I know for me it is. I am not productive in summer. I don't want to do anything in the summer. It's too hot, I don't like the heat. So I tend to be a bit of a machine when it comes to January, february, because I just like to hunker down in my studio. I like to make plans, I like to work on things. It's too dark to be out in my garden, so I am very productive in Q1. And then it kind of dwindles until around September and then I park back up. So plan around when your body rhythms are. Plan around when your business's busy periods are. I mean, for me my busy period is September to December. It is bananas, and so I plan around that. I don't book vacations in October and November as much as I would love to, because September is a fantastic month to travel, but it doesn't really work very well for my business. Summer is very slow for my business, which is great because I don't like doing a lot in the summer, so that meshes very well with my personal rhythms.
Speaker 1:
This is also really a time to block out vacations. We all need time off, we all need a little chance to have a breather and you can book your vacations. For a lot of us, we have to book our vacations around when our kids are out of school. So if that is, you then start thinking about that. Start thinking about what you'd want to do with your kids during spring break or during the summer, or if you're even going to take them out of school for a week in the fall so that you can enjoy a cheaper vacation in September where it's less crowded, and if you don't have kids to worry about, well then the whole calendar is your vacation oyster and you can book time. But it is so important to make sure you actually book that time and take that time away from your business, and not doing it is not a badge of honor, it is just a surefire way to sign yourself up for some serious burnout and mental health issues. So book those vacations.
Speaker 1:
But ultimately, what I just want you all to think about is that you don't need to get it all done this month. You don't need to completely change and transform into this incredibly productive, efficient, healthy, only good habit machine in one month, because it just doesn't work. It doesn't work for very many people. So plan accordingly. Don't let yourself get pulled into the January plan or trap month, which is for some of us it's great, for others it's not so great.
Speaker 1:
But anyway, I just wanted you all to think about that. It's just pace yourself, because it's a long year ahead of us and there's going to be great stuff that's going to happen this year and there's going to be crappy stuff. That happens this year, because that's just how it works. So if you can pace yourself, if you can plan for these down times, if you can build in some space for yourself in your calendar, both for your personal space but also space for your business to work on things, it really really helps keep you going through the year. And yeah, you know, marathon runners never sprint, ever. Everything is very calculated in terms of the pacing that they do and we need to be like that too as business owners. So I'll let you say be gentle on yourself for the month of January and remember it is naturally a season of hibernation, so it's okay. If you just want to curl up in the evenings with a good book and some movies and some popcorn and a glass of wine or whatever, it's totally okay. That's it for this week and yeah, like I said, I don't know if I'll be back with another episode for January.
Speaker 1:
I might. I kind of had an idea for one, but it needs a little bit of research so we'll see how it goes. But so this might be a bonus episode, it might be the January episode, we'll see. As always, if you have a suggestion for these monthly subscriber only episodes. Please drop me a note. I'm always looking for new ideas. It's the hardest part about doing these extra episodes is actually coming up with things that I know you'll be interested in. So if you have something on your mind, shoot me a note at andshelookedupatgmailcom or you can DM me on Instagram at andshelookedup. I'll talk to you all real soon.