38. 3 Ways to Be More Productive
As a designer, you wear lots of different hats in your business. You also have multiple moving pieces that need to be addressed, sometimes simultaneously, which is why designers often fall into a cycle of panic and overwhelm.
You need an organized way to approach your work. Whether it's streamlining the internal pieces of your business like your systems and processes or navigating the external tasks like marketing or client-facing projects, I've got three strategies that will make you more efficient, effective, and consistent at moving the needle in your business.
Join me this week as I offer three highly effective approaches for getting your work done. You'll hear how these three strategies will help you and your team stay calm, organized, and focused, how I apply these methods in my own business, and why utilizing different approaches helps you be more productive and fine-tune how you work best.
My brand new free interactive workshop, the Summer Business Detox is happening tomorrow, July 13th, 2023 at 1pm EST! It’s where we’ll detox your business to get rid of the time and energy drains so you can do what I call the slow up, which is paring things down to make more progress with less time and effort.
There are still a few spots left for the upcoming session of Out of Overwhelm! We kick off on July 18th 2023, so there’s still time for you to join us and get your planner and program guide in the mail. Click here to find out more!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
3 different ways to get work done in your interior design business.
What the steady approach entails, and how it helps you make progress.
How batching makes it easier for you to stay in the flow of your work.
Why intentional sprints allow you to move the needle in your business.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 38. In this one I’m sharing three highly efficient and effective ways to get work done in your interior design business, whether it’s on the back end or moving client work forward. You’re going to want to keep listening.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to any of you who are new. And welcome back to those of you who’ve been listening with me since the beginning. I can’t believe I started this last October and now here we are cruising into summer. When you’re listening to this, it’ll be post Fourth of July, but I’m recording it before the holiday weekend and I’m getting pretty excited. I think we had just some more supplies delivered.
Every Fourth of July since we’ve purchased our cabin, we participate in the Fourth of July boat parade and it’s pretty fun. Everyone gets their boat, I don’t know, I was going to say dressed up, decorated in a theme. You don’t have to participate, but a lot of people do. And then you cruise around the lake where people are watching and cheering and then there’s a judge and they pick a winner.
Last year, we feel like we were robbed of our win. It was a very well executed, in my opinion, construction theme, but the Top Gun theme one. And so now this year, we are really going to bring it with our pirate theme. It’s going to be extreme. We are even going to have a smoking Cannon and someone’s going to walk the plank. It will not be me, I can guarantee that, but someone will. So I’ll be able to report back on how that all goes. I know you’re going to all be in suspense waiting to hear, but fingers crossed.
All right, let’s get started with today’s episode. Today, what I want to share with you are three different ways that you can think about getting work done in your interior design business so that you can be more efficient, more effective and consistently move things forward. Whether those things are internal, such as systems and processes, external like marketing or client-facing such as getting projects done.
The reason I want to talk about these three specific ways to work is because I know you have a lot of moving pieces in your business. You wear a lot of hats as a designer. Because of this, you really need an organized way to approach your work. And thinking about your work in these three buckets that I’m going to share will help you and your team stay calm, organized and make it easier to stay consistent and focused when you know what type of work method you’re using for what type of work.
There are really three core ways to get the work done in your business, and you might even be doing some of these already. And if you are, this is an invitation to look at the why behind each method so you can be more intentional with how you dip in and out of these approaches to best serve you and your business.
The three methods are steady, batching, and sprints. I’m going to go over what each of these are and how to use them to your advantage. Steady is exactly what it sounds like. You’re making consistent progress over a period of time. This is where you’re probably going to land if you have a big goal or a big project you can’t complete all at once.
There’s lots of pieces that need to come together, you’ve got other people involved in the project, you’re probably going to be on the steady route. This could be you overhauling a process in your business, implementing something like a new project management system or a large client project that’s going to take time to complete, which is going to be pretty much every client project.
You might have some of the other two methods, which are batching and sprinting involved in the steady method, you can sprinkle those in. But overall if you’re looking at something like a big project or goal, you’re going to be going with a steady approach.
The way that I work in my business is to set a yearly goal, which I highly recommend you do too, and then create quarterly plans to support that goal. And within the quarterly plans I use the project breakdown process that I teach my clients to help them identify, outline and plan for those projects and create a series of mini-results, which are all of the little things that are going to come together over a period of time to create your ultimate result.
The steady approach takes something that feels really big and unmanageable and makes it manageable because of those mini-results you’re creating. It allows you to consistently make progress. And then you can plan for those mini-results, and your daily, weekly and monthly planning to really ensure that you’re consistently moving the ball forward.
So often I’ll hear from clients, oh, I just wish I could shut down for a week or have everyone leave me alone for a week so I can get this thing done. And you don’t actually need to do that. You could if you wanted to. And I also want you to know with the steady approach, breaking things down into doable, manageable chunks, you don’t need to completely disappear to still make progress.
Often we’re waiting for those big chunks of time to become available to work on something and then, of course, they never come and so you don’t actually ever get started on anything. Whereas if you’re working on a project plan broken down into mini-results, you can get a little bit done at a time and pretty soon it really adds up.
The second approach I want you to consider is batching. Batching is one of the ways you can apply the time management concept I teach in Out Of Overwhelm, which is group like with like. Essentially, you’re putting similar activities together to minimize context switching, which is just switching from different types of activities and different types of thinking back and forth.
What this does is it reduces the cognitive load, meaning kind of the drain on your brain, and makes it easier to stay in the flow. You can get really creative with batching. It can be things that are more obvious like with like, such as maybe writing specifications, placing orders, those types of things. But you can also batch phone calls, order tracking, invoicing, sourcing for multiple projects from the same vendor, pitching yourself or PR, lots of ways to do this. And I highly recommend it.
While I approach my podcast and quarterly projects with the steady method, there are certain things I do like to batch like my Monday Mindset newsletter. That’s the email that I send out every Monday without fail since the beginning of my business, where I share inspiration, tips, tools, strategies. All the things that you love about listening to this podcast, you get an extra dose of it, and it’s a bite-sized dose for you to start your week off right.
If you’re not on Monday Mindset, I’m putting the link in the show notes so that you can sign up and make sure you’re on that list. It’s, of course, also where I make announcements about trainings and events that I’m participating in or hosting myself, so you really want to be on there.
The reason I really like to batch the Monday Mindset newsletters is because I get such great enjoyment from being in the flow of writing. Actually, I love to write. I know for some of you that isn’t the case, but I really love creating those notes for you. Actually, this is another side note, but in college I did major in interior design and some of my favorite classes were the writing ones, not actually the design ones. I loved the design ones, but I would just get lost in the opportunities to dissect and analyze and write about design.
So when I have an opportunity to batch these newsletters together, it’s a treat for me. And it’s also easier for my team to then batch their work where they’re taking the copy that I’ve provided in the Google Doc and getting it set into individual emails and scheduling it in my email provider. So it works for me and it works for them.
I personally think batching in general works really well with content. I especially see this with clients who have resistance to creating content, whether that’s a blog or a newsletter or social media. The reason why I like the batching for this if you have resistance is that you only have to work through the resistance once in a while or once per month, depending on your cadence.
You get your brain on board, you get into action, get on with it and then you’re done. Then you don’t have it hanging over your head and you don’t end up shoulding yourself about how you should be doing it and you’re not and da, da, da, da. It’s so much easier, less time consuming, right, because you’re grouping like with like and then that makes it less time consuming overall.
The third method, the final method that I want you to consider are sprints. Sprint’s are dedicated times of focus where you plan to really move the needle and close some loops in your business. These are intentional sprint’s, it’s not you’re cramming in all the last minute things you meant to get done ahead of time.
A sprint can have many different durations. It could be for an hour or two, it could be a half day, a full day, it could be a period of a few days. You really get to define what sprint looks like to you. You could use this during certain phases of the design process where you really like to tune things out and go all in on the creative process. Or if you have a special project that you want to implement on your back-end for client experience or possibly onboarding team members, whatever that might be, and really create some space for it to dive in.
Typically, when I’ll use a sprint in my own business is when I’m creating a new training or intellectual property to use with my coaching clients. For example, I recently did a sprint where I created three new resources as bonus materials for inside Out Of Overwhelm.
There is now a resource on making powerful quick decisions. A worksheet that walks you through processing a difficult emotion, so basically getting you out of those anxious, really challenging emotional states to a state of steady and calm so that you can be more effective, whether that’s in managing your workload during the day and getting things done or if you’re having a difficult conversation with a client. And then there’s another resource on tracking and managing project timelines.
So I did all of those as a sprint. There was one week where I set aside time on three consecutive days to do those resources a couple of hours at a time. I want to make a few notes about sprints. Sprints are not rushing and pushing yourself to exhaustion. I want to make sure that we’re on the same page about that.
I like to think of sprinting in my work as a push, but there’s still always a little bit left in the tank. I’m not getting too empty. If we were to keep that metaphor going, I’m not going past that point of I’m completely depleted and now I need to lay on the ground and catch my breath.
I highly recommend that if you choose to use a sprint method, build in a rest period after the sprint. Just like if you’ve ever done a running sprint, you’re going to want to take a little break before you get back into whatever else it is you’re working out. And that doesn’t mean you have to flop down and not do a single thing for the rest of the day or the week, you could if you wanted to, but you don’t have to.
What I’m saying is be strategic with what you do or don’t plan following the sprint. Maybe it’s going for a walk around the block or lunch out with a friend or just yourself to reset. Or maybe you’re even planning some activity such as admin work that really requires a lot less mental energy following the sprint. This really allows you to cycle through work periods and capitalize on focus periods of time while also not burning yourself out.
To recap, the three methods are steady, batching, and sprints, which brings me to how do you use these in your business? One of the things that I have every client do when they work with me is track their time for a week. You could definitely do this too and I highly recommend it. Essentially, you’re writing down everything you do for that week, and then going through and identifying how you could use each of these strategies, the steady, batching and sprints, to streamline your production and your productivity.
As you do this, I really want you to go into it with a spirit of experimentation. Try out a different method and approach and see what works for you. There really is no right or best way to do this, it’s really what works best for you. And the best way to figure that out is to just get started trying them.
When you utilize these ways of working and intentionally plan for different approaches, you’ll be more efficient, your work time will be more productive and you’ll be able to fine-tune how you work best and start to structure your schedule around these preferences. I even use these methods in my personal life.
For example, batching phone calls for doctors or house maintenance. Or I’ll do the steady method when I’m cleaning out closets for that seasonal change. I might do my daughter’s dresser one day and then my son’s dresser another and move from one space to the other because thinking about going through everything all at once sounds completely exhausting.
Just pick one of these methods and start playing around with this and then I’d love to know how it’s going. You can always send me a message on Instagram at Desi Creswell. That’s what I have for you today on the podcast.
I also want you to know that I have a brand new workshop and hosting live with Mydoma. The Summer Business Detox is tomorrow if you’re listening to this episode the day that it comes out. We are going to detox your business to get rid of the time and energy drains so you can do what I call the slow up, which is paring things down to make more progress with less time and effort. So instead of slowing down, you slow up.
The link for this interactive workshop, because I will be taking you through the detox process live on the call, is in the show notes. And if you can’t be there live, there will be a replay. I hope to see you there. And until then I’m wishing you a beautiful week as always, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. Welcome to any of you who are new. And welcome back to those of you who’ve been listening with me since the beginning. I can’t believe I started this last October and now here we are cruising into summer. When you’re listening to this, it’ll be post Fourth of July, but I’m recording it before the holiday weekend and I’m getting pretty excited. I think we had just some more supplies delivered.
Every Fourth of July since we’ve purchased our cabin, we participate in the Fourth of July boat parade and it’s pretty fun. Everyone gets their boat, I don’t know, I was going to say dressed up, decorated in a theme. You don’t have to participate, but a lot of people do. And then you cruise around the lake where people are watching and cheering and then there’s a judge and they pick a winner.
Last year, we feel like we were robbed of our win. It was a very well executed, in my opinion, construction theme, but the Top Gun theme one. And so now this year, we are really going to bring it with our pirate theme. It’s going to be extreme. We are even going to have a smoking Cannon and someone’s going to walk the plank. It will not be me, I can guarantee that, but someone will. So I’ll be able to report back on how that all goes. I know you’re going to all be in suspense waiting to hear, but fingers crossed.
All right, let’s get started with today’s episode. Today, what I want to share with you are three different ways that you can think about getting work done in your interior design business so that you can be more efficient, more effective and consistently move things forward. Whether those things are internal, such as systems and processes, external like marketing or client-facing such as getting projects done.
The reason I want to talk about these three specific ways to work is because I know you have a lot of moving pieces in your business. You wear a lot of hats as a designer. Because of this, you really need an organized way to approach your work. And thinking about your work in these three buckets that I’m going to share will help you and your team stay calm, organized and make it easier to stay consistent and focused when you know what type of work method you’re using for what type of work.
There are really three core ways to get the work done in your business, and you might even be doing some of these already. And if you are, this is an invitation to look at the why behind each method so you can be more intentional with how you dip in and out of these approaches to best serve you and your business.
The three methods are steady, batching, and sprints. I’m going to go over what each of these are and how to use them to your advantage. Steady is exactly what it sounds like. You’re making consistent progress over a period of time. This is where you’re probably going to land if you have a big goal or a big project you can’t complete all at once.
There’s lots of pieces that need to come together, you’ve got other people involved in the project, you’re probably going to be on the steady route. This could be you overhauling a process in your business, implementing something like a new project management system or a large client project that’s going to take time to complete, which is going to be pretty much every client project.
You might have some of the other two methods, which are batching and sprinting involved in the steady method, you can sprinkle those in. But overall if you’re looking at something like a big project or goal, you’re going to be going with a steady approach.
The way that I work in my business is to set a yearly goal, which I highly recommend you do too, and then create quarterly plans to support that goal. And within the quarterly plans I use the project breakdown process that I teach my clients to help them identify, outline and plan for those projects and create a series of mini-results, which are all of the little things that are going to come together over a period of time to create your ultimate result.
The steady approach takes something that feels really big and unmanageable and makes it manageable because of those mini-results you’re creating. It allows you to consistently make progress. And then you can plan for those mini-results, and your daily, weekly and monthly planning to really ensure that you’re consistently moving the ball forward.
So often I’ll hear from clients, oh, I just wish I could shut down for a week or have everyone leave me alone for a week so I can get this thing done. And you don’t actually need to do that. You could if you wanted to. And I also want you to know with the steady approach, breaking things down into doable, manageable chunks, you don’t need to completely disappear to still make progress.
Often we’re waiting for those big chunks of time to become available to work on something and then, of course, they never come and so you don’t actually ever get started on anything. Whereas if you’re working on a project plan broken down into mini-results, you can get a little bit done at a time and pretty soon it really adds up.
The second approach I want you to consider is batching. Batching is one of the ways you can apply the time management concept I teach in Out Of Overwhelm, which is group like with like. Essentially, you’re putting similar activities together to minimize context switching, which is just switching from different types of activities and different types of thinking back and forth.
What this does is it reduces the cognitive load, meaning kind of the drain on your brain, and makes it easier to stay in the flow. You can get really creative with batching. It can be things that are more obvious like with like, such as maybe writing specifications, placing orders, those types of things. But you can also batch phone calls, order tracking, invoicing, sourcing for multiple projects from the same vendor, pitching yourself or PR, lots of ways to do this. And I highly recommend it.
While I approach my podcast and quarterly projects with the steady method, there are certain things I do like to batch like my Monday Mindset newsletter. That’s the email that I send out every Monday without fail since the beginning of my business, where I share inspiration, tips, tools, strategies. All the things that you love about listening to this podcast, you get an extra dose of it, and it’s a bite-sized dose for you to start your week off right.
If you’re not on Monday Mindset, I’m putting the link in the show notes so that you can sign up and make sure you’re on that list. It’s, of course, also where I make announcements about trainings and events that I’m participating in or hosting myself, so you really want to be on there.
The reason I really like to batch the Monday Mindset newsletters is because I get such great enjoyment from being in the flow of writing. Actually, I love to write. I know for some of you that isn’t the case, but I really love creating those notes for you. Actually, this is another side note, but in college I did major in interior design and some of my favorite classes were the writing ones, not actually the design ones. I loved the design ones, but I would just get lost in the opportunities to dissect and analyze and write about design.
So when I have an opportunity to batch these newsletters together, it’s a treat for me. And it’s also easier for my team to then batch their work where they’re taking the copy that I’ve provided in the Google Doc and getting it set into individual emails and scheduling it in my email provider. So it works for me and it works for them.
I personally think batching in general works really well with content. I especially see this with clients who have resistance to creating content, whether that’s a blog or a newsletter or social media. The reason why I like the batching for this if you have resistance is that you only have to work through the resistance once in a while or once per month, depending on your cadence.
You get your brain on board, you get into action, get on with it and then you’re done. Then you don’t have it hanging over your head and you don’t end up shoulding yourself about how you should be doing it and you’re not and da, da, da, da. It’s so much easier, less time consuming, right, because you’re grouping like with like and then that makes it less time consuming overall.
The third method, the final method that I want you to consider are sprints. Sprint’s are dedicated times of focus where you plan to really move the needle and close some loops in your business. These are intentional sprint’s, it’s not you’re cramming in all the last minute things you meant to get done ahead of time.
A sprint can have many different durations. It could be for an hour or two, it could be a half day, a full day, it could be a period of a few days. You really get to define what sprint looks like to you. You could use this during certain phases of the design process where you really like to tune things out and go all in on the creative process. Or if you have a special project that you want to implement on your back-end for client experience or possibly onboarding team members, whatever that might be, and really create some space for it to dive in.
Typically, when I’ll use a sprint in my own business is when I’m creating a new training or intellectual property to use with my coaching clients. For example, I recently did a sprint where I created three new resources as bonus materials for inside Out Of Overwhelm.
There is now a resource on making powerful quick decisions. A worksheet that walks you through processing a difficult emotion, so basically getting you out of those anxious, really challenging emotional states to a state of steady and calm so that you can be more effective, whether that’s in managing your workload during the day and getting things done or if you’re having a difficult conversation with a client. And then there’s another resource on tracking and managing project timelines.
So I did all of those as a sprint. There was one week where I set aside time on three consecutive days to do those resources a couple of hours at a time. I want to make a few notes about sprints. Sprints are not rushing and pushing yourself to exhaustion. I want to make sure that we’re on the same page about that.
I like to think of sprinting in my work as a push, but there’s still always a little bit left in the tank. I’m not getting too empty. If we were to keep that metaphor going, I’m not going past that point of I’m completely depleted and now I need to lay on the ground and catch my breath.
I highly recommend that if you choose to use a sprint method, build in a rest period after the sprint. Just like if you’ve ever done a running sprint, you’re going to want to take a little break before you get back into whatever else it is you’re working out. And that doesn’t mean you have to flop down and not do a single thing for the rest of the day or the week, you could if you wanted to, but you don’t have to.
What I’m saying is be strategic with what you do or don’t plan following the sprint. Maybe it’s going for a walk around the block or lunch out with a friend or just yourself to reset. Or maybe you’re even planning some activity such as admin work that really requires a lot less mental energy following the sprint. This really allows you to cycle through work periods and capitalize on focus periods of time while also not burning yourself out.
To recap, the three methods are steady, batching, and sprints, which brings me to how do you use these in your business? One of the things that I have every client do when they work with me is track their time for a week. You could definitely do this too and I highly recommend it. Essentially, you’re writing down everything you do for that week, and then going through and identifying how you could use each of these strategies, the steady, batching and sprints, to streamline your production and your productivity.
As you do this, I really want you to go into it with a spirit of experimentation. Try out a different method and approach and see what works for you. There really is no right or best way to do this, it’s really what works best for you. And the best way to figure that out is to just get started trying them.
When you utilize these ways of working and intentionally plan for different approaches, you’ll be more efficient, your work time will be more productive and you’ll be able to fine-tune how you work best and start to structure your schedule around these preferences. I even use these methods in my personal life.
For example, batching phone calls for doctors or house maintenance. Or I’ll do the steady method when I’m cleaning out closets for that seasonal change. I might do my daughter’s dresser one day and then my son’s dresser another and move from one space to the other because thinking about going through everything all at once sounds completely exhausting.
Just pick one of these methods and start playing around with this and then I’d love to know how it’s going. You can always send me a message on Instagram at Desi Creswell. That’s what I have for you today on the podcast.
I also want you to know that I have a brand new workshop and hosting live with Mydoma. The Summer Business Detox is tomorrow if you’re listening to this episode the day that it comes out. We are going to detox your business to get rid of the time and energy drains so you can do what I call the slow up, which is paring things down to make more progress with less time and effort. So instead of slowing down, you slow up.
The link for this interactive workshop, because I will be taking you through the detox process live on the call, is in the show notes. And if you can’t be there live, there will be a replay. I hope to see you there. And until then I’m wishing you a beautiful week as always, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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