Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

It’s super-important.

Seri­ously, though, I’ve spent the last five weeks with my dom­i­nant arm in a giant cast. (Although after week two, I regained the use of my elbow and some fin­gers and by week three was able to use an extra couple of fin­gers on my right hand while typing, which has helped. My draw­ings, how­ever, still look like they were done by a five-year-old, and I sign credit card receipts with a squiggle and/or lip­stick kisses.) Mean­while, the work has by no means slowed down, even though my working speed has, and it’s still chal­lenging to do simple things like make a sand­wich for lunch or empty the garbage.

Accord­ingly, I’ve been working rather long hours and have been becoming intensely stressed out. (Throw in the fact that I’ve quit smoking in sup­port of Bone Healing Power and the fact that I’m some­times still in a good deal of pain–breaking your bones stinks!) Luckily, I have the greatest clients and friends in the world who help me out and under­stand when things take a little longer than they ought, or I’d have gone entirely insane by now.

I am not going here, although I rather wish I were. It’s basi­cally my stress-free island par­adise. Unfor­tu­nately, Croatia is a long drive from here.

So, in the inter­ests of pre­serving that afore­men­tioned sanity, I’m run­ning away to a secret undis­closed island loca­tion this weekend, where I’m hoping I won’t be able to get cell-phone ser­vice, and I won’t have any way of leaving until a nice fish­erman comes to get me. My laptop, shock­ingly enough, is staying home (it’s very rarely far from me) and I’m excited by the prospect of no elec­tricity, no emails, and no pos­sible way for me to try to get any work done. I’ve noticed that as I get busier, it’s harder for me to actu­ally take a full day off, in spite of how impor­tant it is for my mental well-being.

If you border on the edge of worka­holi­cism, I rec­om­mend get­ting tough with your­self and forcing your­self into iso­la­tion. So long as you can return refreshed, and not dreading a mas­sive pile of new emails, it’ll make you so much more pro­duc­tive in the long run. And so on that note: ciao, amigos!

So my poor tele­phone is on its last legs, and I’m finally breaking down and get­ting a shiny new iPhone, for a wide variety of rea­sons. (It’s pretty! It does “smart” stuff that my Stu­pid­Phone Black­berry can’t! It can play music and take photos that don’t look totally ter­rible! Designing iPhone apps will be easier if I can actu­ally see how things work!)

This prob­ably means that I’ll be forced to finally change my voice­mail mes­sage, which is faulted for fea­turing a lengthy pause between me speaking and the beep, among other things like being mumbly and unclear. Since I very rarely pick up the phone, and I never pick it up when I don’t rec­og­nize the number, I am thinking I’ll change the mes­sage to read: “Hi! This is Sarah. I’m not picking up because I’m busy working on your project. Send me an email instead!”

My hatred for the tele­phone, I think, is well-justified. (I sound a little like a monkey on meth while on the tele­phone as well, but that’s irrel­e­vant. Mostly.) While some people seem to think it’s annoying that it’s so hard to get me on the tele­phone, I have my rea­sons, and I’m sticking by my guns.

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For the past few months, I’ve been plan­ning and plot­ting and get­ting myself excited about the prospect of another big trip. Those who know me are well aware of my fond­ness for travel, and I haven’t gone any­where inter­esting (Ottawa doesn’t count) for some time. I had big plans (South America, Death Valley, Mexico) that never mate­ri­al­ized, for one reason or another, and I was sure that this was the one I’d be able to do.

As it turns out, it’s not. Due to a variety of fac­tors, I’m staying home. While this was a little crushing at first to realize (I was so excited!), I am choosing instead to approach it as an oppor­tu­nity to enjoy the nice Hal­ifax weather that’s been hap­pening lately (must be a cosmic fluke and/or the uni­verse con­spiring to send me thou­sands of tiny little signs that I should abandon my plans of aban­don­ment) and to spend more time doing fun projects, which I almost invari­ably wouldn’t be doing if I were on the road.

For starters, I’m finally going to invest the time and floor­space into set­ting up a proper work­space for myself, rather than just lounging on the couch all the time–I do miss having cre­ative space (why oh why did I sell my drafting table at a yard sale for $15?) and things stuck all over my walls, and some­times the entire upstairs of my apart­ment looks like it’s been hit by a cyclone that car­ries nothing but paper scraps, bot­tles of ink, and empty cans of energy drinks.

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For a girl who never wears a watch and doesn’t care much for num­bers, I’m obsessed with time. When you bill an hourly rate, of course, this is only to be expected—after all, the time = money equa­tion becomes far more self-evident when you know exactly what an hour is worth.

In theory, this focus on time should engender the ability to del­e­gate. If it takes you two hours to do some­thing that you could bill, say, $120 for, but you can pay someone $60 instead to do (regard­less of how long it may take them, and assuming that they’ll do it just as well, if you happen to be a con­trol freak like I am), it should make sense to start passing off tasks.

The problem is, when you have a pre­cise idea of how much that extra hour you spent sleeping cost you, you sud­denly start to believe that sleep is anthema to your busi­ness and well-being. Three years of run­ning a busi­ness full time have taught me, finally, that this is just a bla­tant lie.
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The past month, I’ve slept an average of three hours a night, and have worked an average of 90 hours a week.

My Valen­tine cards took more time to pro­duce & pre­pare than I’d expected, although I’ve heard so much very encour­aging feed­back that’s it’s been quite delightful, espe­cially as it’s my first-ever foray into making & selling my own work. (If you’re inter­ested in a card, they’re avail­able on Etsy, or in Hal­ifax at Duly Noted Sta­tionary on Quin­pool and Love, Me Bou­tique on Birm­ingham. I’ll also be selling them in person this weekend at the Har­bour­side Market in Dartmouth.)

I’ve been also working on a whole boat­load of projects, in between all the inking and painting and pan­icking. I’ve got a few web­sites in the works, a logo, and a printed booklet with a short turn­around time, along with all the usual Wicker Empo­rium work. I’ve been meeting with all sorts of people to dis­cuss new projects, and am working on fin­ishing up some projects that have been drag­ging their heels for too long.

Out­side of that, I just took my first screen printing class last night, and it was rather delightful. Given that my print work is all dig­ital offset printing, I’ve never had an oppor­tu­nity to apply any of delightful things I learned in school, like trap­ping and reg­is­tra­tion and colour plates, all of which now I have a prac­tical use for. I’m get­ting more and more excited about doing more work by hand, and am hoping the print process will lead to all sorts of exciting new devel­op­ments and discoveries.

In short, while sleep would be nice, I’m happy to be mad-busy and thrilled about my work again.

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m deter­mined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two min­utes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two min­utes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rear­ranging. (more…)

The winter blues were rough this year. I’m blaming it on my having lost my Doesto­evsky. The Switch’s web­site is coming along swim­mingly, and I’ve started work on a redesign of kisserup.com. I’ve got another project back­burnered as I don’t like to have too much on the go at once, but I seem to be coming out of my winter blues and am get­ting back to being Pro­duc­tivity Girl! Hurrah!

I’m begin­ning to learn my life would be far easier if I were capable of just let­ting things alone already.

Instead, I redesign, I redesign, I redesign, and I’m never happy with what I’ve come up with after having spent forty hours staring at it at 400% mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, trying to get divs to line up pixel-perfect.

I’m in the process of adding a little bit of explana­tory text to each entry, having finally suc­cumbed to the wiles of expo­si­tion in the “do I or don’t I?” conun­drum, and as a result, I’m adding some pieces that might have seemed a little off-kilter without proper narrative.

The winter blues have their claws firmly entrenched, and I’ve fin­ished my Doesto­evsky (which was my “beat the winter blues book”, the ratio­nale being that Rus­sians are colder and more depressed than I am), so I’m busy trying to main­tain a feeling of productivity.