business journaling

I haven’t posted in a while but….I’m back! This blog is very scattered…like my brain😂

A fellow small business owner that I follow on Instagram recently listed some ways to make working for yourself fun, and one of them was…business journaling! I love journaling and often journal about my business already, but thought it would be fun to try journaling ONLY about my business and see what that’s like. During quarantine, I’ve also made it a goal to do personal journaling once a week, which has been really good for me. So maybe adding business journaling into the mix would be beneficial as well.

So here we go! Some recent highlights around my business…

• I’m taking a two week break starting this weekend, which is…possibly the longest break I’ve taken from my business since starting it like 4ish years ago. Crazy!! It’s like my baby.
• I gave paid small business advice to someone for the first time this month 😬
• I’m participating for the first time as a speaker in an online summit of art related workshops!
• I designed 30 greeting cards in 30 days.
• I HIRED AN ACCOUNTANT OMG!!! (such a great decision.)

Didn’t realize so much has happened in such a short span of time. Guess it’s good to take the time to step back and reflect a little.

One thing I’ve been meaning to try and learn more about this year is marketing. Pretty much all I actively do is Instagram, which has definitely been helpful and gotten me new opportunities, but it always feels like I’m guessing and waiting and hoping for sales and projects. How does one actively pursue accumulating them?? My next goal is to figure out a way to do more active marketing that’s realistic and sustainable for me. But I guess knowing exactly what I want to market would be a first step.

However, as I think about the focus of my business it feels, as always, extremely scattered. There’s Etsy, commissions, Kiwi Co, Skillshare, digital stickers, random one off client projects…etc. Sometimes I feel like focusing in on one thing would be more efficient, but at the same time I do kind of enjoy doing a bunch of different things at once. 🤷🏻‍♀️

February Daily Doodles

Although these are a whole half month late…here are my February doodles!

January Daily Doodles!

A doodle a day from January 2020

Past & Present Comics

I’m currently taking a class for fun at the community college called Comic Memoirs. I was inspired after reading my first graphic novel “I was their American Dream” and seeing the author Malaka Gharib speak at an event. I never knew much about the world of zines and graphics novels, except I realized I was TOTALLY on my way to being a zinester in elementary school!!

Below is a comic I made with my friend Angie in 5th grade that she still has a copy of, followed by my first mini comic assignment from my comic memoir class!

5th grade comic:

Last week comic:

Behind the Scenes

What I had to do to achieve this shot in my Skillshare video:

Exhibit A – tripod tilted over desk, with couch for assistance

Exhibit B – smaller tripod with bendy legs and phone holder attachment, wrapped around regular tripod, with a bean bag heat pack as a weight on the whole thing

Exhibit C – house plants moved from their window sill homes to the spot on the ground where I usually keep my trash can so they can peek out from the edge of the desk in the shot and give the frame some greenery

Now I don’t want to take down or disturb this setup until my Skillshare is fully published JUST IN CASE I need to re-film anything lol

Doodles of New York

I drew one comic a day during my vacation in New York as my vacation project to help document the trip!

Day 1 – Red Eye

Day 2 – Pants

Day 3 – Katz Deli

Day 4 – Calm Before the Storm

Day 5 – Sunglasses of Tribeca

Day 6 – Haul Doodle

Skillshare Planning

I’m working on a new Skillshare class!! It’s tentatively titled Creative Productivity: Simple Planning Strategies for Freelancers. I partially feel inadequate to teach this subject because I’m definitely still figuring this topic out for myself. I don’t have the perfect advice to give, but I’ve also learned so much over time, and I think it’s the importance of improvement over time that I hope to impart to anyone who takes the class.

I’ve always been fascinated with how to be more productive, especially since starting my own freelancing business and realizing how big of a difference it makes to be organized and have process. I’m not a very structured or organized person by nature so I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with different ways to increase my productivity through creating structure/organization. I’ve watched some online content about productivity and it all seems very practical and straightforward, but there’s something about them that always seem too rigid for me, or too specific of a process. Something about other people’s methods don’t quite work for the way I function. I think everyone works differently and sometimes you need to mix and match different processes to create a personalized way of doing things that’s best for you. So I’m hoping my class resonate with the other less structured creatives out there and gives flexible enough principles to adapt to any work flow.

Planning the class itself has definitely been a test of my own productivity methods lol. Wondering if it would be too meta to use planning of the Skillshare itself as a live example in my Skillshare of my planning methods?!

I’m also currently making some downloadable worksheets based on things I use in my own workflow! Here are some of my processes that I’m planning to convert to printable downloads:

1 – paper kanban board

2 – Weekly planner

3 – Lists….possiblyyyy too many lists…

Good luck to me on finishing this class in a timely manner! *fingers crossed*

Batch Please

Progress report on my batching endeavors! (See my last post for why I started this.) I think I’m still a long way off from where I want to be, but I’ve already made some improvements so far:

1. Replying emails in chunks. Instead of answering emails as I get them, I’ve been saving them up to take care of all in one chunk – at the beginning of the work day and at the end if needed. It’s been GOOD! Replying emails feels tedious and annoying sometimes, so doing them all at once gets me in a flow and I feel like I accomplished something at the end.
2. Planning my future IG content. I started a spreadsheet to plan out the content and images for my future posts. It’s going okay…….it feels hard to always have the images ahead of time or feel like I can come up with a lot of interesting content in one sitting.
3. Setting aside hours for client work. I’ve been reserving either the first half or second half of the day for clients/commissions and using the other half for everything else like product, marketing, etc. That way, if anything non-client comes up during that time, I can give myself permission to put it aside for the moment. I’ve found it really true that my brain needs time to settle into a certain kind of task, so once I get into the zone it’s more productive to stay there for a while than to jump around and multi-task different things.

Signing off with a doodle representation of pre vs post batching!

Batch Goals

One of my goals with work right now is to figure out how to work smarter instead of harder, and I want to try batching more of my tasks.

The decision to pursue this was inspired by 3 things:

1. Someone I follow on IG posted a Youtube video about how she was able to work smarter and save time by batching tasks – for instance, instead of preparing each instagram pic and caption right before posting it, she would plan a whole month’s worth of posts in one sitting, thereby saving all the time she would have spent each day doing it.
2. Later, I listened to a webinar that talked about how instead of multi-tasking and doing a bunch of different tasks, having four hour chunks of focusing deeply on one task gets you the most productivity. And that makes sense with the idea of batching as well.
3. Finally, I noticed something in the last couple of weeks that have helped my productivity. Last week, I decided at the beginning of each day what I wanted to accomplish that day. It didn’t leave me feeling very satisfied and I kept feeling anxious about if I had done enough that day, or I’d would feel unmotivated when I wasn’t sure what task to tackle next. But at the beginning of this week, I wrote out a loose schedule of what I wanted the whole week to look like, what events I had going on, and what main goals I wanted to accomplish. It was super general, but it helped SO MUCH that I didn’t have to come up with a to do list at the beginning of each day, and having a bigger picture of the whole week’s goals relieved pressure to cram as much as possible into one day for fear of not having enough time later, if that makes sense.

SO. Seeing that focused planning and batching tasks has made a positive difference in even such a small way, I’m hopeful that it will work in other bigger areas as well!

Things I want to try batching:

• Instagram posts
• Email newsletter content
• Patreon content
• Printing and packaging tasks
• Brainstorming new ideas

Stay tuned for how this goes….

Concluding with a pic of the chaos/structure that is my weekly schedule/to do list. ❤

The Highs and Lows of Market Weekends

Just finished vending at Alki Art fair this weekend for the third summer in a row! Such a good event every year 🙂

After a good market, I feel so exhilarated and exhausted at the same time:

Exhilarating –

• Interacting with people and see them respond/react to my art
• I love that when people connect with my work, they have an immediate openness to me and we can instantly talk like friends!
• Feeling like all the hard work I’ve put in is paying off

Exhausting –

• Working all weekend and trying to carve out other time to rest
• Wanting to do nothing and relax the next day but always having so many time sensitive to-dos and follow up emails/messages to take care of
• Setting up and tearing down my canopy, display, and product before and after the event – so much tetris in my little Corolla

I’m trying to find a happy medium of rest today by taking care of to-do list items, emails, and messages in a relaxing cute coffee shop environment to convince myself I’m making a field trip out of work, haha.

Happy Monday!