Nothing fancy here this month - just the three biggest, solid anti-procrastination strategies that work for me. The key there being "for me". They might not be new to you, they may not work for everyone, but, I'm hoping that one of these strategies might be something you can adapt and use for yourself!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Nothing fancy here this month - just the three biggest, solid anti-procrastination strategies that work for me. The key there being "for me". They might not be new to you, they may not work for everyone, but, I'm hoping that one of these strategies might be something you can adapt and use for yourself!
Each week The And She Looked Up Podcast sits down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. This podcast is for Canadian artists, makers and creators who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love.
Your host, Melissa Hartfiel (@finelimedesigns), left a 20 year career in corporate retail and has been happily self-employed as a working creative since 2010. She's a graphic designer, writer and illustrator as well as the co-founder of a multi-six figure a year business in the digital content space. She resides just outside of Vancouver, BC.
Speaker 1:
Hello everyone and welcome to the May Premium Subscriber episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. Thank you all so much as always for being here and supporting the show. And I just want to remind you that we are coming up on the close of Season 5, so we'll be going on hiatus for June, july and August. Actually, I think the last episode of season five will be June 3rd, but we'll essentially be gone for three months and I do just want to remind you all that you will still be getting your monthly premium subscriber episodes through the hiatus, so that will still be happening, and I will just be taking a little bit of time to recharge and plan out what will be happening in season six. And, as always, if you have some ideas or suggestions or ways you think we could make the show better in season six, I'd really love to hear from you. So feel free to drop me a note at. And she looked up at gmailcom and it would be much appreciated. Looked up at gmailcom and it would be much appreciated. So on that note, let's get on to our May episode.
Speaker 1:
And today I thought I would talk about procrastination, because I am an expert procrastinator and I suspect many of us are. I can get a lot of mundane, silly things done when I'm procrastinating from something I know I need to do, or sometimes even something I want to do, but whatever, there's some kind of mental block hanging over me. Anyway, so over the years I have found three tactics that really seem to work for me. So I just want to preface that by saying that these are things that work for me. I can't say that they're going to work for you. I certainly hope they do. And maybe, if they're things you haven't considered before or tried before, um, there are things that you can try and maybe they will work for you. So you can try and maybe they will work for you. So, um, yeah, I have three, three big things that really seem to help get me moving. And the first one is having an accountability partner. And this is something I think that we can all do. But I find having someone that I'm accountable for really motivates me to get working on things.
Speaker 1:
And you know, when I worked in a corporate environment, an office environment, or even on a frontline retail environment, there was always deadlines for everything. So there was always something hanging over my head where I had to get something done or people were going to be waiting on me, or they were going to be disappointed in me, or it could affect my job performance reviews, all of those things. So you know you're pretty highly motivated in those kinds of situations. But when you work for yourself, it's a little bit different, because you're the one making the deadlines, you're the one who's deciding how your workday goes. I really struggled the first few years of being self-employed more than the last few years. After selling that business, I am now back to being a solo business owner, and so it was easy to start to fall back into that trap. So I really had to sort of pull into my bag of tricks to get myself motivated to do certain things and, like I said, an accountability partner has been a really big thing for me.
Speaker 1:
This is somebody that you bring on board I guess, for lack of a better word to help you hit your goals. So you're going to have to share with them the goals and things that you want to achieve and the deadlines that you want to hit, and the idea is that they nudge you to keep you on track. Now, this doesn't have to be a fellow artist or creative or even a small business owner. It could be your mom, it could be a good friend, but what it does have to be is somebody who's not going to be afraid to call you out. I think sometimes, when it's somebody who really cares about us or loves us, they often don't want to rock the boat by pushing you to do something that you said you wanted to do, start missing those deadlines, or you keep putting off the thing that you've told them you want to do. They may not be, they may not feel comfortable pestering you about it. So I think you need to choose somebody who you know will hold you to task, I guess, for lack of a better word and again, this might not work for everybody, but this works for me. One of the things that has really helped me with this is co-working. So I've mentioned this before.
Speaker 1:
Three mornings a week I meet up with one of the women in my mastermind and we co-work for three hours every morning. We do it from nine till noon my time. She's in a different time zone so it's different for her. A few other women from our mastermind group pop in quite regularly, but her and I have sort of made this commitment to one another that we will show up these three days for these three hours, will show up these three days for these three hours, and it's very rare that one of us misses them. And I love this because it's a very short, sprint type of exercise of keeping yourself accountable. So we meet up. First thing we do it over Zoom, so it's a video chat, and we tell each other what it is that we're going to be working on that morning and what we want to get accomplished before the end of our session. And then we go our separate ways.
Speaker 1:
We keep Zoom on, we keep the video on, so it's like we're in the same room with each other and we just get down to work and about halfway through 90 minutes in we meet up again and we sort of have a bit of a check-in and kind of let the other person know how we're doing, what we got to and if we ran into any struggles or challenges. And it's a great opportunity to get some feedback if something isn't working or you're stuck and you're not sure how to get through to the next thing. So it's nice to have that little 90 minute check-in and then we go back to work and then we check in again at the end of the session and sort of see how we did, and it's great. It keeps you accountable. But beyond just keeping you accountable, it keeps somebody there with you who can help you work through the blocks that often happen when we're procrastinating, or the challenges when we run into something we don't know how to maneuver around either because we don't have the technical knowledge or something we haven't encountered before. And sometimes it's just nice to be able to bounce feedback off of somebody. And so this has worked extremely well for me and I would like to say, it's worked really well for the person I co-work with because she's still there with me.
Speaker 1:
I think we've been doing this about eight or nine months now, and it's been so beneficial that my productivity has increased so much. And the nice thing about this is that those early hours of the day nine till noon are my least productive hours of the day. I really struggle to get going that early in the morning, but knowing that I'm going to be sitting down with her for three hours really gets me into the right frame of mind. And the cool thing is, on the days where we don't co-work, I now find it so much easier to get to work on my own. I feel like it's just become like a micro habit that now my brain is kind of expecting to sit in a chair for those few hours, or not always sit in a chair, because I don't always sit in a chair while we're co-working Sometimes I'm doing photography, sometimes I'm packing orders, whatever the case may be but to actually come into my studio and get to work, it's now become something my brain expects to do and it works really great. So the other thing I like about this is that she's not afraid to call me out if I'm pushing something off too much, and I hope I do the same for her. So it works really well.
Speaker 1:
I think I've lucked out in that I found the right person to do this with and we found a way to do this that works for both of us. I'm also in a mastermind group, as I mentioned, and my coworker is part of that mastermind, and a couple of the other women in the mastermind do join us from time to time when their schedules allow. Our mastermind is across Canada mastermind, so we're all in different time zones, so it's not always feasible that we can all be there at the same time to co-work, but having a mastermind is another really great way to be held accountable, because we do have a weekly or not weekly. We have a monthly video check-in. We have the opportunity to check in with one another in our Facebook group. We have a private Facebook group, and so it's really nice to kind of have that accountability every month where we check in on how we did for the month and where we're struggling. And I think, with a mastermind it's really great because you get three, four or five, depending on how big your group is people who, when they can all see that you're struggling, they're all able to give you ideas and suggestions as to what might be causing you to struggle or what might be blocking you or maybe how you could pivot a little bit so that, instead of procrastinating, you are embracing the project that you need to work on. So I think there's a huge benefit to surrounding yourself with people who can help you stay accountable to the things that you are saying are important to you and your business. So I think that's an important distinction to make too. So that is a big thing for me.
Speaker 1:
The second thing that works really well for me is rewarding myself. I like to gamify things. I like to get treats Maybe it's very five years old of me, I don't know, but I really do like to know that there's something at the end of the task. This is another place where my morning co-working really helps me, because the person that I co-work with and the other women who drop in, I also consider them good friends, and so it's really nice at the end of our co-working session to just be able to have a chat for half an hour or about whatever, like. It often has nothing to do with work, it's just chit chat about life, and so it's um. My reward is that I get to socialize with somebody who I really want to socialize with, and so that's a very nice bonus of my accountability partner and um and my coworking. So I find that really that's. That's a nice little reward for me. When it comes to other rewards, I don't have a lot of extra money at the moment, and so I'm not talking about rewards where I go out and I buy myself something, although occasionally I do that but for me rewards can be anything from getting to go for a walk One of my favorite rewards is actually walking down to the library, which is about a six minute walk from my house, and just browsing the books.
Speaker 1:
I don't even necessarily have to get a book out. Sometimes I just like to go. I just I love libraries. They're very soothing places to me and I love books, and so it's just. It might sound silly, but for me it's a treat and it's a little reward. There used to be a chapter's Indigo about two miles away from me and I also used to go there quite frequently as a reward for getting something done. But they're gone now. So the library it is. Sometimes it's just walking down to Tim Hortons, which is just across from the library, and getting a hot chocolate or a donut. And if I want a fancy reward, I'll go across the street to the little indie cafe and spend $10 to get a chai latte and a biscotti. So that is usually the extent of how much I'll spend on a reward, but most often it's something that's free and so it'll be something like I said going to the library, going for a walk could be 10 minutes of playing a video game on my phone, whatever it is. That is a treat and that you would really love to be doing and it works really well for me, and so those I often give myself for doing work in smaller increments. It's kind of a take on the Pomodoro technique, and if you're familiar with that, the idea is that you work for a set period of time, like 30 minutes usually, and then you take a five to 15 minute break to do something completely different. So that's kind of what this is If you do. If I work for 30 minutes or an hour or I get this specific task that I don't enjoy, like entering my expenses, then I get to go do something that's really enjoyable and pleasant for me as a reward. So that is the second thing that works really well for me.
Speaker 1:
The last thing that I do and I've talked about them quite often on the show is I create challenges for myself, and so usually these challenges are based around a project or something to nurture my creativity, and I've done everything from a short seven day actually I've done even short. I've done things like a draw this in my in your style challenge, which is like a one day challenge really up to a seven day challenge, a 30 day challenge, a hundred day challenge, and I've done, or attempted to do, some 365 challenges where I commit to doing something every day during that timeframe and what I commit to can vary in so many ways. I've done and completed a 365 day photography challenge where I took a photo a day. I've completed multiple hundred day challenges where I have created a piece of art every day for a hundred days. Like I said, I've done the draw this in your style. These are challenges that a lot of illustrators run on Instagram, where they will post a small illustration and challenge their followers to recreate the illustration in their own art style, and those are really fun. They're a really fun way to get to know other creatives and it can be a great prompt as well if you're struggling with what to draw, and so those usually last a day, and there's something that it can be really fun.
Speaker 1:
One thing I've learned with doing challenges is that this is probably a little different for everyone, but the thing that I've learned the most is that it's really important to keep what you're committing to do on a daily basis manageable. Last year, I started a 365 day challenge where I was going to create one new illustration every day for a year and I tapped out around 212 or 220, somewhere in there because I was burnt out and it was just too much work to create a finished piece of art every day. It was something that I initially thought in my head would take me 10 to 15 minutes, and in reality it was taking me close to one or two hours, and I didn't always have one or two hours in a day to get the challenge done. So I think if I were to do another 365 day challenge, I would break it down into something more manageable. Like I have to draw for 10 minutes every day, um, and I think that would be a little more, a little bit more manageable.
Speaker 1:
But I do these challenges because very often I tend to procrastinate from actually creating art because art is fun for me, and so it's the thing that I tend to put off, because I feel like I should be doing more serious work. I should be doing my client work, I should be doing marketing, I should be doing social media, I should be doing all these things relating to my business, social media, I should be doing all these things relating to my business, and I often forget that the art is the reason I have a business. It sounds so, so dumb when you say it out loud, but that's really how it works. I don't know, I just it's a mental block, and so by committing to these challenges, I'm getting through that procrastination block or I don't know. Maybe by turning it into a challenge I'm actually turning it into work. I don't know, I need to think that one through, but anyway it really helps me create on a consistent basis.
Speaker 1:
When I do these kinds of challenges and, like I said, they don't have to be 365 days, they can be seven days, they can be 30 days, they can be a hundred days I think the key is having some kind of goal with the challenge. For me and remember I'm talking about myself the idea behind all of this is for these to maybe give you some ideas and adapt them to suit you and how you work. But for me, having a short task to do every day, especially a task that I can check off because I'm very much a list person and I like checking things off my list really motivates me and it gets me going. And even though I only did 220 days last year, I wound up with so much artwork Much of it is artwork that is usable and this year I have been creating so many new products, all based off that artwork that I did last year, and I've only used a tiny fraction of the artwork I created last year. So that has been.
Speaker 1:
That was a game changer for me. Even though I didn't complete the whole year, it was a huge game changer for me to sit down every day and create art. So you don't need to be an illustrator or an artist to do this. It could be sitting down and writing for 10 minutes, or completing 300 words in a day, or 500 words or whatever is sort of a good short word count for you. That's manageable, but this still allows you to sit down and dig in, and when it's manageable and it's doable, you're far more likely to continue doing it every day. So it's a great way to form a micro habit and it's a great way to put your butt in the chair unless, of course, you're a photographer and then maybe you're going out and you're taking photos.
Speaker 1:
Photography was one that worked really well for me to do for a full year, because you can take a photograph in 10 or 15 minutes. You can do that. You can even edit it take a photograph and edit it in 10 or 15 minutes. So photography is something that is really suited to this kind of challenge. But for other things, where you may be working on a much bigger piece of work, then segment it. This is also a great way to work on bigger projects.
Speaker 1:
So, if you have a project that you really want to do like I have a project in my head that I've wanted to do for years and I've really been thinking about it the last year, like it's so big that it's almost overwhelming and I don't know where to fit it in or how to do it. But I was thinking about it the last few weeks Like what if I split this up into very small chunks? Like how could I split it up into very small chunks so that I could spend 10 or 15 minutes every day working on it and maybe in six months to a year I would have the completed project. So that's another way that you can tackle these bigger, juicier, creative projects is by turning it into a daily challenge. So, anyway, those are three of the things that really work for me when it comes to beating back procrastination and actually sitting down and doing the work.
Speaker 1:
So I thought I would share them with you this month in the hopes that they maybe they will help you. I hope they do, and if you have some tricks or tips to how you get through procrastination, I would love it if you would leave it in the comments. If you're on Patreon, you can leave it in the comments to this post. If you're on Buzzsprout, feel free to drop me an email. I'd love to hear from you. So that is it for May, and I will be back next month with another new episode. And, again, as always, if you have a suggestion for something you would like for me to tackle in these premium subscriber episodes, I would love to hear from you. So please do not be shy and drop me a note. That's it. I hope you all have a really good month. Talk to you soon.