5 Work Habits I Am Proud of and Urge Other Business Owners to Adopt

Over the years, I have developed some habits I am slightly embarrassed to share with people (that will be next week's list) and I few I am really proud of that I share with peers and emerging artists.

5 Work Habits I Am Proud of and Urge Other Business Owners to Adopt

Task Scheduling

A wise creative, Andrew Simonet, who I have followed for nearly a decade now, always preaches breaking up your big goals into small, manageable tasks. Once that practice is done, you have to assign due dates to each step, ensuring those things will actually get done. So I have a couple Google calendars linked up to Notion, the project management software Rock & Roar Creative uses, to help me link up tasks with due dates or just a general sense of High Priority, Low Priority, etc.

We met with a potential PR firm earlier this year to talk about promoting our upcoming children's book (Courage Takes Practice - follow us on Insta!), I was told "You are the most organized artist I've ever met!"

You know my little OCD heart flitter fluttered when I heard those words.

I'm still learning to fully adopt this step! Some goals are so big that I don't know how to break it up. Ask for advice from those you trust. Ask for help from someone in your field who seem to have their priorities figured out. (They may not, but they could guide you in the right direction.)

Time Tracking

Artists. Must. Learn. How. Much. Time.
They. Spend. Arting.

If you don't track your time, you'll never know how to cost-effectively charge for your work without driving down your hourly rate. I used to use apps like a stopwatch so that I could track down to the minute how much time I spent on each task. That quickly became overwhelming and just became ANOTHER task to remember to do.

That was also back in the days when I could work on 8 different projects/clients a day. However, I have recently decided to limit myself to only work with 3 clients a day, tops, so that I could unleash myself from the stop-watch apps (Besides, spending 5 minutes on one client one random day wasn't data I felt like I needed.) and really focus more on the bigger tasks at hand with fewer clients per work day, rather than time tracking every single minute.

No matter whether you track down to minute, round up to 15 mins (meaning, even if you only work on something for 5 minutes, you round it up to 15 minutes for charging purposes) or just try to block out a pre-determined chunk of hours per client, please please try to record how much time you spend on the work you do. You would be amazed, once you can gather enough data to come up with totals and averages, how that data can inform a better use of your time down the road.

This habit took about a few years to fully adopt. You'll forget a lot but just keep tracking when you can remember and it will become second nature eventually.

Money Tracking

Same philosophy for time tracking, I have a spreadsheet that plots out exactly where each paycheck will go. Savings, credit, rent, groceries, kiddo, travel, etc. I no longer wonder where all my money went. I know exactly where it is. In my bank account.

Time and Money is so intertwined. Because I document how much time I spend on each client, I also know exactly how much I earned per hour for each project. That allows me to charge more for new projects. Data is key!

Real talk though, living abroad helps money stay in the bank account, frankly. There is no Amazon (the ecommerce) company here....just the Amazon jungle.

This habit took about a few years to fully adopt. Knowing exactly how to organize a spreadsheet the same way your brain organizes itself takes a while.

No Answering
Emails after 6pm

I knew when I was pregnant with Olivia that she would never have to wonder whether work was my real priority, rather than her. So I made it a point to never answer emails after 6pm, therefore ensuring that I wouldn't be having conversations on my phone instead of spending time with my kiddo.

I also, thankfully, have clients who understand this. I am sure when you are a smaller cog in a larger institution, you don't have the freedom to not respond to emails at any given hour but hopefully, more companies can adopt the "do not contact employees outside of work hours" legislation being passed in a few countries around the world.

I may still check my my emails before I go to bed (a habit I am trying to kick) but I never answer them, as a way of training the other people I work with my boundaries around work hours.

This habit took about a year to fully adopt. When you've cultivated an expectation that you will respond instantly, it is hard to retrain yourself to wait. It's even harder to retrain clients that they may not hear from you until the next day.

Mama Time Self Care Hour

Not ONLY do I stop responding to emails at 6pm, I also shut down my computer at an hour before daycare closes (I will still respond to emails for an hour on my phone if I feel like).

Because I want to fully be present for my daughter once she gets home from daycare, the entire hour before she comes home is Mama Time.

I take a full hour to do whatever the heck I want. Read. Netflix. Hulu. Garden. Scroll Tiktok. I take that hour for myself because honestly, I go to bed shortly after my kiddo, so this one hour is the only time I have truly for myself to engage in something I love or just totally zone out.

I find I can rarely take an early hour first thing in the morning because I do feel an urgency to start responding to emails and finish small to do's that were communicated in those late night emails. It took a while to figure out what hour worked the best for me, but after a few weeks of shutting the computer down at around 4:30, my brain literally starts to slow down around 4pm. So 4:30-5:30 is all mine.

It did NOT take long for me to adopt this habit.
3 weeks, tops.