Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

I have sent out so many estim­ates in the past couple of months, it would make your head spin. This week alone, I have three open estim­ates floating about, and another couple of leads to follow up on. I hate writing estim­ates. It takes a lot longer than invoicing and feels much less rewarding. It’s always a tiny little bit nerve-wracking waiting for the response back: will we be making beau­tiful things together?

I don’t know if it’s some­thing I’m doing wrong, but I haven’t heard a single yes in all this time. I’ve been doing my reg­ular client work, and I’ve been taking on little main­ten­ance or exten­sion pro­jects for old cli­ents here and there, but I just haven’t picked up an exciting new pro­ject for ages. I am going through a brutal busi­ness dry spell.

I’d love to say I’m totally cool about it—but that would be a lie. I’m freaking out a little. It doesn’t help, of course, that I recently gave the taxman a metric ton of cash, or that I’m still adjusting to being back in a country where wine costs triple what I think it should, and that I keep doing asinine things like racking up expensive speeding tickets. I’m nat­ur­ally pretty para­noid about money, which is great in some respects—I have no debt and money stored away that I refuse to touch until I actu­ally am desperate—but lousy in the respect that it means that I feel like I’m “broke”, even though I’m really not.

Is it crazy to worry that your busi­ness might be barren? (Probably.)

1. Keep calm and carry on.

When my dry spell started (what feels like a mil­lion years ago) I totally freaked out. I was con­vinced that I’d finally done in my busi­ness and was destined to spend the rest of my days living in a card­board box (full of shoes) under the over­pass. I debated moving to Costa Rica and becoming a banana farmer.

Then I took a deep breath and remembered that it’s summer—or, at least, Canada’s variant of the theme—and that busi­ness is always slow this time of year. There’s a summer slow­down every year, and every year I’ve had this exact same panic attack. Per­haps there’s a pat­tern there, given how I’m not presently eating out of dumpsters.

2. It’s not me, it’s you.

Most of the responses to my estim­ates haven’t been straight-up “no”s. Most have been vari­ants of “we don’t have the budget right now”, or “the client changed their mind”, or “we’ll revisit this later in the year”. There’s a good chance that a lot of these leads will turn into actual pro­jects in the future—I’ve had some leads turn into great work years down the line. It’s not really a com­forting thought when I’m looking for work now, but it at least helps my self-esteem to realize it’s not just because I suck that the work isn’t coming in as enthu­si­ast­ic­ally as I’d like it to be.

It’s easy to let this sort of thing get you down, which is a dan­gerous place to be. I’m at my hap­piest when I feel like I’m being pro­ductive and I’m pro­du­cing great work for my cli­ents. This feeling of idle­ness, coupled with the sting of rejec­tion, can easily derail motiv­a­tion. I’ll admit I’m in a bit of a slump, and it hasn’t helped that I’m still suf­fering from the wan­der­lust and a sort of exist­en­tialist what-does-it-all-mean life-evaluation syn­drome induced by my return to Canada.

I posted a list of pos­itive reminders on my fridge, where I can look at it every day, and told myself to get it together. You can’t take any­thing per­son­ally when you’re run­ning a business.

3.  Don’t get desperate.

Don’t take on pro­jects you’ll hate (unless they’ll pay a ton). Don’t do stuff for a lot cheaper than you would oth­er­wise. It’s so tempting to take on lousy pro­jects when it feels as though nothing is coming through, but in the long run, doing so is devaluing both to your own busi­ness and to the industry as a whole. I’d rather spend my time finally sorting out all my accounting (ugh) than par­ti­cip­ating in spec work, or entering lame-o design con­tests where my logo could win $100 if I happen to be the lucky chosen one. (Actu­ally, there’s a whole slew of revolting things I’d rather do than that.) Ulti­mately, devaluing your work just because things happen to be slow will con­tribute to the sense of neg­ative self-worth brought about by the slump, and it’s dif­fi­cult to recover once things start run­ning smoothly again.

4. Focus on other stuff.

I’ve got a list as long as my arm of summer projects—some design related, some not—and I have no time to do any of it. It’s driving me bonkers, actu­ally. I’m in a dry spell! Shouldn’t I have gads of time to fritter away? Appar­ently, it doesn’t quite work this way, since I’m spending a lot of time sending out emails and going to meet­ings for pro­jects that don’t pan out. It’s frus­trating, but a neces­sary part of the process.

I’ve been doing a little, though. I’m social­izing more. I’ve actu­ally read a whole entire book all the way though to the end. I’ve been going on little short-jaunt in-country trips to appease my wan­der­lust. I keep buying wine bottles with ugly labels, with the inten­tion of doing my own personal-project redesigns. (Admit­tedly pro­gress on this front tends to be sul­lied by my drinking the bottle as “research” before get­ting down to work.) I’m plan­ning for my next series of travels, and learning to ride a motor­cycle so I don’t kill myself touring Thai­land. I bought vin­tage roller-skates and am learning how not to fall on my tail­bone. I’ve got a whole list of business-y admin type things to do, and another list of per­sonal pro­jects and fun things. I’m cer­tainly not bored.

I have wanted a pair of roller­skates since I was a little kid, and now I’m a little ter­ri­fied of them. Appar­ently breaking both your wrists in one summer makes you paranoid.

Keeping busy dis­tracts from the fact that you aren’t, in fact, busy at all.

5. Think happy thoughts!

Ulti­mately, in order to get through a slump, I think you need to stay men­tally afloat. For me, it’s too easy to get dragged down by a slump, which only mag­ni­fies the problem. My busi­ness is the only stable, con­stant thing in my life, really, and I’d be lost if I felt that I’d lost it.

So instead, I’m focusing on all the good things that are going on. For starters, all these people are coming to me asking about work, which is a great sign. I’m still not doing any active mar­keting, and I’m still get­ting leads. For every client who drives me up the wall and tempts me to use Let me Google that for you, I have two great cli­ents who I adore and whose emails make me smile. I’m still making enough money to keep me in sand­wiches, diet Coke, and shoes for the fore­see­able future. My life is never boring and I basic­ally get to make up my own rules for everything. I have won­derful cli­ents, great friends, and I can travel the world while run­ning my business.

And if I can just remember how lucky I am, I’ll stop feeling so defeated when things aren’t perfect.

Every year, I have the best inten­tions to cel­eb­rate my busi­ness’ birthday in some fashion. Every year, I remember two weeks too late. Trig­gers & Sparks is basic­ally my neg­lected child. I sup­pose that might explain why every now and again, it throws temper tantrums.

There are a number of anniversaries I could celebrate—the day I left my full-time job, or the day I was first paid for work, but this one falls nicely in the middle and is simple enough to remember: by sheer coin­cid­ence, the date on my offi­cial busi­ness regis­tra­tion is 06.06.06. While I’m neither reli­gious or satan­istic, I do believe in serendipity, and thought a pat­tern of num­bers that has such impact on people could only be a good sign. Next year will mark my offi­cial six-year anniversary. Maybe if I set an alarm for it now, I’ll actu­ally remember to break out the cham­pagne and fire­works when it rolls around.

Alright, so I did throw a birthday party in early June, but I must have been so dis­tracted with cel­eb­rating human birth­days that I totally forgot about my poor little business.

I’ve learned a lot since I built my first “pro­fes­sional” website—obviously—in trade for a beau­tiful bicycle that was stolen about ten minutes after I got it. Here are the most important things.

1. Never say no. Instead, say “expensive”.

This flies in the face of everything that everyone says about being a freel­ancer, but I stick by it, and it’s worked quite nicely for me. If someone comes to me with a pro­ject that sounds boring, tedious, or gen­er­ally awful, I won’t say “no, I won’t do that” unless I know I’m not cap­able of seeing the pro­ject through to its com­ple­tion well. I’ll just say “sure, I can do that” and quote a nice high figure. That way, if the client balks at the price and tells me they can’t afford it, nobody’s lost out—it’s basic­ally like I’ve said no. How­ever, if they say yes, I’ll pro­ceed with the pro­ject and be well-compensated for whatever addi­tional frus­tra­tions or tediums come along with the project.

This approach may sound mean, but it works. It also means that some­times I can charge less for the pro­jects that are going to be more fun, but may not have as large a budget. Of course, this only works so well because I aban­doned hourly billing for almost all pro­jects and switched to a flat-rate, which has been a major blessing. And switching to flat-rate only worked once I’d been doing this for long enough to be able to tell how long cer­tain tasks take, which took at least a year.

2. Stop working 18 hour days.

This is a con­stant pro­cess for me. My five months in South America helped me enorm­ously with my work­aholi­cism. I actu­ally find it chal­len­ging to work week­ends now, and I usu­ally only work around ten hours a day—sometimes even less!

For years, I’d to work every single day, from the moment I woke in the morning until the wee hours of the night. This felt normal, after all—when I was in school, I was always working as well, and even when I was working, I was doing freel­ance work after get­ting home. I’ve always been like this—I have a lot of energy and I feel better when I’m pro­ductive. But run­ning a busi­ness is so unstruc­tured (at least the way that I do it) that Extreme Work­aholic Beha­viours simply aren’t sus­tain­able long-term.

I spent the first few years of busi­ness con­stantly burnt out, and even­tu­ally it really started to get to me. I was let­ting things slip. I’d have little mental break­downs in which I’d burst into tears, bab­bling about “the jug­gling balls break when I drop them!”, and then would refuse to leave my bed­room for a few days until I’d recovered. My work was suf­fering, and my brain would prob­ably have even­tu­ally imploded on itself.

These days, I work less. I socialize more, and I try to do healthy things I never had time for before like eat and exer­cise on a daily basis. I’m hap­pier, I’m doing better work, and my cli­ents are hap­pier. Everyone wins!

3. Talk to everyone and their dog.

I will take a meeting with anyone. Anyone! Since coming back to Canada I’ve actu­ally been having lots of in-person meet­ings and I’ve real­ized I really miss it. (That may just be because I don’t usu­ally drink coffee unless I’m going to meet­ings, and it makes me very excitable.)

Often­times these meet­ings won’t lead to busi­ness at all, so they’re a time invest­ment that may not pay off. I’ve actu­ally been tricked into “meet­ings” that turned out to be more like “dates” more than once, which can be a little awk­ward when you realize what’s happened.

Meeting people and talking to them is never an effi­cient use of my time. How­ever, it allows me human inter­ac­tion that I often lack sit­ting in front of a screen all day, and I often learn things I wouldn’t oth­er­wise from an email con­ver­sa­tion. There’s some­thing to be said for sit­ting down with a stranger for an hour. Everyone—generally speaking—can teach me some­thing, whether it’s of rel­ev­ance to my work or not, and I’ve learned so many things for all these mil­lions of meet­ings over the years. They’ve also helped me become expo­nen­tially more sure of myself. Some­times just hearing your­self talk and real­izing that—surprise!—you know what you’re talking about can do just that.

4. Con­stant work is worth its weight in platinum.

Cash flow issues can really make or break a busi­ness. (Canada Post employees, this is why I give you dirty looks when I pass you milling about in front of the dead post office that con­tains my cheques.) I have a line of credit that covers me when I’m waiting for invoices to be paid, but it’s not an ideal situ­ation as it becomes very easy to acci­dent­ally end up in over your head when you can’t really budget effectively.

Years ago, I started doing reg­ular weekly work for a local cli­ents. It’s often not the most wildly exciting work, and it doesn’t pay nearly as well as the one-off pro­ject I do, but it’s been a life­line for me. The fact that I don’t have to write up estim­ates, go to meet­ings, send end­less emails, nego­tiate or wait for the work, means that I can offer a lower (hourly) rate than I usu­ally would, and get­ting paid every two weeks means I don’t worry so much about my cash flow any­more. Basic­ally, it gives me the bits that I liked about having a “real job”—stability—without cramping my vagabonding-unscheduled-flower-child sort of style of business.

5. Work less, charge more.

I charged all of $300 for one of my very first web­sites. It was such a bad idea, and the incred­ibly low rates I started off char­ging def­in­itely explain why it took me a few years to actu­ally be making any money at all. My rates increased fairly dra­mat­ic­ally for a little while until they reached some­thing of a plateau. I’ve hit the bal­ance point where I feel that what I charge is fair, indic­ative of my ability, and allows me to buy shoes every now and again (okay, some­times more often than that, but don’t tell).

Char­ging more means that I can spend more time on pro­jects, which I like to do. I’m kind of on the anal-retentive super-detail-oriented side anyway, and char­ging $300 for a web­site simply doesn’t allow me to do the kind of quality work that I like to. From time to time, people still email me looking for the cheapest option, and I explain that I’m no longer com­peting on price. I don’t want to be the IKEA of graphic design. I want my design work to stand up, and I’d rather my cli­ents not have to build everything them­selves from incom­pre­hens­ible dia­grams. My cli­ents pay more now than they used to, but the work they get is infin­itely better. They get my full atten­tion, they get sup­port whenever they need it, and the end result is always much, much better than it would have been had I been char­ging bargain-basement prices.

And again, my cli­ents are hap­pier. More and more, I’m working with cli­ents I love, who respect my work and my sug­ges­tions, and who really are a delight to work for. I’m hap­pier working for these people, and they in turn refer other awe­some cli­ents over to me. It’s a lovely cycle.

Just one part of world I’ve seen—the beau­tiful, com­plic­ated Bud­apest. Summer 2009.

All told, I’m so lucky to have come this far and still be run­ning my busi­ness. I have the kind of freedom I’ve always wanted—I can travel the world, I can sit out­side and work on sunny days, and I’m con­stantly chal­lenged and excited by new pro­jects. I’m never bored, I get to meet some great people, I make my own rules, and I very rarely have to wake up at 8am.

I never intended to start a busi­ness, and every now and again, I con­sider going back to a real-live job. How­ever, the longer I do this, the less and less likely that becomes. I really do love my job.

Busi­ness­wise, the last few weeks have been quite active for me. I’ve heard from lots of new cli­ents and have started quite a number of new pro­jects. I’ve even heard from old pro­spects I’d for­gotten about, and I’ve had interest crop up from new con­tacts. I noticed, how­ever, that while I’m working an awful lot, I’m spending quite a sur­prising amount of time on non-billable work.

Usu­ally, I’d determine this Not a Very Good Thing. It’s always dan­gerous, when you’re run­ning a busi­ness, to fall into the trap of spending too much time working on the busi­ness, and not enough time working in it, but I sus­pect I rather tend to err on the other side, and I could do with spending more of my time making my busi­ness run a little smoother.

So, I may be crazy busy, but I’ve been investing some time into set­ting things up so that my pro­jects can run a little more smoothly, which I expect to be well worth it in the long run.

1. I started using Basecamp.

I avoided using Base­camp for ages. I’m a big fan of boot­strap­ping it, and as a result I avoid any­thing that entails a monthly fee like the plague. I’m also only a one-man op, at least most of the time, so I don’t usu­ally need a great deal more co-ordination than “sending out emails back and forth”. I once installed a stan­dalone pro­ject man­age­ment system, and found it inef­fective: I was spending too much time entering dates and todos and doing admin­is­trative tasks, rather than actu­ally achieving any­thing pro­ductive, and my cli­ents were con­fused by the inter­face and pro­cess. Accord­ingly, I gave up on the idea of pro­ject management.

Then, along came the Night­mare Pro­ject. If you know me, you’ve prob­ably heard of the Night­mare Pro­ject. (Not to be con­fused with the Night­mare Nib­bler, which was actu­ally a Dream Pro­ject, and needs to be added to my web­site very shortly.) I may still be working on the Night­mare Pro­ject on my deathbed. It’s been mis­man­aged; it’s out-of-control; and every day there are twenty dif­ferent emails flying round, indis­crim­in­ately reply-alled. I have no idea if files I’m sent are final, there’s no repos­itory, no organ­iz­a­tion, no whatever. It causes me an immense amount of stress and I have very little con­trol over the situ­ation, as the pro­ject man­age­ment isn’t in my hands at all.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.
(more…)

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.