Celebrating 5 Years in Business!
Rock & Roar is 5 years old!
We survived moving abroad.
We are (still) surviving a pandemic.
We are growing, we are learning, we are doing fun stuff this year!
To commemorate this milestone,
Rock & Roar will release "Lists of 5" every week throughout the year that will give you a peek into the everyday-is-different lifestyle of an artist freelancer mom who absolutely loves what she does - but absolutely has bad days and has learned from utter failures throughout her career.
Welcome and thank you for your continued support - strap in!
We work from home.
How do we get ready in the morning when every day is different, you ask?
Rock & Roar Morning Routine
5 things we do every morning to prepare ourselves for a productive day:
Get the kiddo up, dressed, fed and off to daycare.
Childcare outside of the home is such a necessary part of our daily routine. We tried having an at-home nanny....for many reasons, it wasn't working.
So we moved to a neighborhood close enough to a wonderful daycare that we can walk to. That way, we can both get some exercise and focus enough to get our work done so that we can be fully present as a parent when we shut down the computers promptly at 5:30pm.______________________________________________
Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.
I grind my own Ecuadorian grown beans every morning.
Nuff said.______________________________________________
Watching GMM with my husband.
I will preface with the fact that I grew up in North Carolina.
Good Mythical Morning is a daily YouTube show that my husband introduced me to when we started dating in 2015. My husband, an Ecuadorian born and raised in Quito, found a show hosted by two North Carolinian boys that I had never heard of. Watching GMM every morning keeps me anchored to a state that will always grasp the majority of my heart.
Rhett and Link's southern accents and idioms make me feel at home even though I am living abroad.______________________________________________
Background Noise
Don't know about the rest of you, but I cannot work in silence. For the past 5 years I have spent most of the working day with the news playing in the background.
That has had it's pros and cons.
2022 (I hope) will be the year I can step away from the news and listen to music again. The Encanto soundtrack is huge in our house right now______________________________________________
A Three-Project To-Do List
Once I have my coffee and GMM fix and am listening to the news or music, I scan through emails from the previous day and Google Calendar to create a to-do list of NO MORE THAN 3 CLIENTS/PROJECTS each day.
(Small tasks or edits that take no more than 5 minutes are welcomed when they pop up.)
I used to work until late into the night until ALL tasks were done. Now, I have conditioned myself (and therefore, have had to condition clients, too) that not everything can get done the day they were requested. Motherhood has helped me in this pursuit, but all freelancers need to learn and assert that, indeed, things can be done tomorrow. Or next week.