November 29, 2022
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Donna: If you are feeling like you are in a rut with zero time up your sleeve to work on your graphic design business. This podcast is for you. Welcome to the design and prosper podcast. Episode 62.
Kris: Hello and welcome to the design and prosper podcast. We’re so happy you are here. We’re talking all things time management today, and that frustration that keeps coming up and we often notice a theme for a month and it’s like this problem that comes up on repeat with all the designers we speak to.
Donna: Absolutely.
Kris: Yeah. And this one this month is I haven’t got any time to work on my business. I’m in a rut. I’m not moving forward. I feel like a rat in a cage I’m just going around and around and around and around and around in circles. You know, I can’t get going and my client work is taking over and I never
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get a chance to actually work on my business to do the things that I need to do to get moving forward.
Donna: It’s astounding. How many times we’ve had this conversation this very week. It’s been an ongoing conversation that we’re having where it’s all about finding the time to pop your CEO hat on. And work on your business. We talked about time management in podcast, number 13.
I think it was how to be a graphic design time management boss. It’s a great episode. So check it out if you, um, haven’t heard it yet. That’s, that’s where we unpacked many different time management techniques. So we’ll pop the link to that podcast in the show notes. But this is about actually prioritizing.
Your time as a CEO and putting your business first. So that’s what we wanna talk to you today. So we’re gonna pop our coaching hats on, and we’re gonna talk to you about how to do this moving forward, how to make your business a priority. Really say my business is the priority and be non-negotiable.
[00:02:00] So we wanna challenge you to make achieving your dreams, your priority. So what’s it gonna take?
Kris: Yeah, let’s unpack the ways to get you moving, moving forward today. That’s what we want. So, first thing, what we wanted to talk about was. And this is something that we’ve noticed. A lot of designers don’t do is to allow your business, your beautiful, precious design business, to get the best of you, not the dribs and drabs not the sloppy seconds.
Your business should get first dibs, and what we mean by that is the best of the energy that you have to bring to the business the best of your time. So what is that for you? Cause we’re all individual. Your ideal time might be eight o’clock in the morning where you’re just on fire and everything.
You know, all the ideas and thoughts are coming in, or it might be later on in the day for you or you, you might be a night owl. So figure out when your best time is and give that
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to your business because we give all too often, we give our best time to our clients.
Donna: And then we’re sitting down at the end of a really long day. Let’s say you are on fire of a morning. And then you go, okay, now I’ve gotta get to my, my business. I’ve gotta get some promotional work done. I’ve gotta, um, do some posts and I’ve gotta let people know where I am and who I am and how I can transform their lives.
And then you’re sitting down. You’re like, Ugh, just wiped. I’m so wiped. Come on, dig deep. And you’re trying to then work on really strategic, conceptual decisions, for your business in order to really transform your business and elevate you to your audience. And it’s like, you’ve got no puff left. You’re you’re there going?
Oh, that’ll do that’ll do you know haven’t we all done that? Oh, it’ll do it’ll do, but you would never, ever do that for a client. You would never sit there and go, oh, that’ll do you know, whatever. So we’ve got to make sure that we are treating our own business with the same
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level of respect and love that we would treat a client’s business and really honor it by giving it that time of the day where you are pumping on all cylinders, where you are, your brain is switched on and you’re excited to be there.
And the work comes easily. That’s another thing, Kris and I talk about all the time. We know we are on. When it, when we are flowing, things are flowing with ease. So we, we know we are really off in the afternoons for Kris and I, we, we sort of get there and we’re like, this is so hard. It’s taking twice as long, we’re getting stuck, you know, it’s to articulate an email it’s it’s dragging on.
So we, we know that that’s the time that we need to maybe pause and think about other things that we can be doing in our business, because we don’t really wanna give that. Either our clients or ourselves. So we wanna create a balance in our business where we’re sharing that best of us with ourselves and with our clients. So everyone’s winning.
Kris: Mm. Yeah, because.
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What I said before about giving the best of you to your business and not just your clients. Um, I might have said not your clients, but yeah, it’s definitely, we’re giving the best of ourselves to our clients because, you know, we want that beautiful repeat business and that’s only gonna happen if the standard of your work is consistently beautiful, all, all the way through and consistently strategic.
But what we can do is be a bit more strategic about our time. We can make the time you work on your business non-negotiable. We can ensure that it’s slotted into your calendar at a time where you are at your optimal working capacity, where you are firing on all cylinders. We can also, um, schedule things in our slower times.
You know, when we, when all the cogs aren’t quite turning as loosely and freely, and you know, you’re not getting those insights, that’s a really good time to do some, perhaps more mechanical tasks. Like have you got
Donna: The tedious stuff.
Kris: Yeah. Have, have you got a website to populate? Have you got, there’s always
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things that we have to do as designers that, don’t require that same level of brain strain, that conceptual strategic thought and working on your business, doing the CEO work is strategic work. It takes calories. It takes brain calories. It takes energy and effort, and you need to be able to show up with that energy and effort every time you do it.
Donna: Yeah, absolutely. The next thing that we want to share with you is when it comes to moving the needle with your design business, we want you to eat the frogs first. So we’ve talked about this before in the past, we talk about this great little book by Brian Tracy called eat that frog. Funnily enough.
Kris: When it comes to the concept of eating that frog, what we tend to do is we tend to prioritize the easy tasks. Those really feel good tasks first, or that those shiny things like it might even be for you.
Something like, um, doing a little animation for Instagram. You go, oh, I
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really wanna play with that because it’s creative and it’s really fun. But what we want you to do is make sure you’re doing. The tasks that feel a bit challenging first. So the whole concept of the eat that frog book is that if you were to wake up in the morning and one of the tasks that you had to do in your day is to eat a frog.
You’d be better off eating at first. Otherwise you’d be better off getting that out of the way, eating the frog so that you’re not torturing yourself by thinking about it all day long, the same applies to your business tasks. You, are way better off getting through those challenging tasks. And honestly, sometimes the CEO stuff, like sitting down and working out your forecast and, and your budget for the month, things like that can feel like a big frog and you can put it off and put it off and put it off and put it off and then it doesn’t happen.
Or you try and do it when you’re really tired at the end of the day. And then it’s really not gonna happen. So eating that frog first is about doing
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those things that might feel a little bit heavy, like creating a new email lead magnet, or setting up some sort of promo that you’re going to send out.
It might be making some scary phone calls, but it’s those needle moving things that are really gonna impact the future of your business. Because when you think about it, that little, beautiful animation that you’re gonna do for a reel, for, for Instagram. Is that really going to impact your business long term?
It can be fun and it can feel like a lovely little shiny thing, but yeah, it can be easy to get swept up and our time can just be so swept up in those kind of things. So it’d be very, and even getting caught up in the Instagram scroll.
Donna: Yes, absolutely. Haven’t we all been there and done that. Um, and the, the other thing is we really recommend as a CEO to actually track all the things that you’re doing so that you are really aware of of the things that are making an impact on your business. Because often we think, well, I am, I’m working on my marketing strategy.
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I’m working on this beautiful animation for Instagram. And, what we want you to ask is how well did that perform? How much time did you invest in that? And is that particular task and is that strategy really, really moving the needle? Because if it isn’t, then that’s when we want you to actually focus on the things that will really, really move the needle.
They might be fun, but are they working? We’re getting you as a CEO to always pop that CEO hat on and check in, check in, check in with exactly what’s happening with your business. So you won’t know if it’s not performing unless you track it. We absolutely love that saying what can be measured, can be managed. So you’ll know the answer to whether or not this fun thing is actually working for you or not. If you measure it. So make sure you do that.
Kris: mm. Like that morning spent on Instagram and feeling like you have to show up and wanting to have that beautiful feed. And, you know, we could go on and on. Could that have been better spent in a more strategic way? Those three hours? Could it have been a LinkedIn strategy where you’re posting content that
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really positions you as an expert? So be very careful about how you’re spending your time.
Hmm. You Need to be accountable be accountable your time.
Donna: You do, especially for your business, especially because you are, you are the boss, the client, the one making all the decisions and you need to be accountable for yourself. Okay. So the next one is being 100% committed. Recently, Kris and I watched a beautiful, um, YouTube.
Um, I think it was a podcast or, or it was an interview anyway, at least, with Marie Forleo and Steven Pressfield, they had a really great conversation that really resonated with us. And it was all about the launch of his new book. And the new book is called, put your heart, put your ass where your heart wants to be, which we absolutely love the title of that book.
And we’re pretty sure Marie will need no introduction because we all know and love Marie Forleo. And If you haven’t heard of Steven Pressfield, he is the author of the war of art. So he’s a really, um, highly acclaimed author, as well as many other amazing books.
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So, so check him out as well. So essentially the conversation that they had was. You really only need to put your ass where your heart wants to be for, um, a certain whatever time you can dedicate per week. But the key is consistency. So if you have got an hour a day, there’s this great little equation that he shared with us and, and forgive me, I’ll read it because it, I need to read equations out.
Um, so if it’s an an hour, a day is seven hours a week, which is 30 hours a month. Which is 365 hours in a year, which is nine by 40 hour weeks. So what he’s saying is you can be a full time CEO, not just the designer, the, this, the, that, the everything else in your business, but full time CEO in your business for just one hour a day, if it’s committed.
And if it’s consistent that you have that 100%
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commitment to that 10% of the time. So 100% every day, non-negotiable you turn up at whatever time you, you are firing on all pistons and you sit down and get your CEO work done. He then shared that story about another famous author who was in the ad industry.
He was an ad man and he wanted to become a full-time author. So what he did was he put his, put his ass where his heart wanted to be for one hour before he started work every single day, he would get to work, shut his office door one hour early. And for that time he was 100% completely present, completely committed to being an author.
Then he would open his door an hour later and he would be the ad man. And in that time he wrote amazing books. They had this approach.
So they carved out the time that it took every single day and they were non-negotiable about it. They sat there every single time, every day for that hour, they
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gave that to where they really wanted their heart and their passions to be. So we need that level of passion for our businesses. We want you to really look at it like that.
Like how can I highly prioritize 100% commit to my business? Where is that time? And how much time do I have?
Kris: Yes. And there was a keyword in there being present. So that presence is so important to, um, whatever you are doing, whatever you’re focused on, be a hundred percent present to it. So whether you are doing your client’s beautiful project, or you are working on the CEO aspect of your business and those tasks, you be 100% committed and 100% present in that moment to it.
Same goes for, you know, if you have kids and it’s time to be with the kids. That’s what balance is really about, I think. Being present in the moment. And it’s also about that whole idea of that author who went in an hour earlier, who carved out that time, probably had to get up an hour earlier.
Probably had to
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watch one hour less television the night before as well, to be able to have the energy to wake up one hour earlier. So we are making choices here all the time. So that brings us to our next point, which is. Make working on your business, a priority. It needs to be a priority. And because you can say, of course it’s a priority.
Like my whole life is swept up in this. It’s not, my whole business is a priority, but is it really? Is working like a CEO, working to move the needle. Is it really a priority? Are your actions really showing this? And this is we’re really gonna put on our business coach hats on here. Because if you are staying up one hour later to watch Netflix as a reward, you know, for a reward for like, gee, I worked hard today and I need these rewards rather than getting your ass out of bed to do the thing that needs to be done in that hour. Well then you’re not really making it a priority. Are you? And I remember hearing this concept and it was like
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a little bit of a, a kick in the guts for me, um, quite a few years ago. Now we went, um, actually Don and I went together. We went and saw this really amazing health expert.
Her name’s Dr. Libby Weaver.
Donna: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Kris: Yeah. We went and saw her and, um, she was talking about women’s health and that it applies to anybody’s health and it was about, she said something like it’s okay. If it’s not your priority, it’s fine. It’s fine. But just fess up that it’s not a priority. Admit it. And it was like, oh, okay. All right. Okay. Yes. Eating the, um, you know, the the hot chips or French fries or whatever has been my priority in terms of like the scheme of things.
Okay. All right. Or not taking my vitamins or eating nutritious food. Has not been a priority. All right. So, uh, she also said this in a blog post that I found not doing these things that maintain our own
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wellbeing is often clothed in statements like I just don’t have time for that I can relate to that. Right. I just don’t have time for that.
And that’s probably true yet, it is only true because we don’t prioritize them. We always make time for things we prioritize. We always do. And if you think about it in your own life, you do. You know, if you’re sick, you stop, you stop work, right? Because your priority is getting well, you just can’t actually do it. It’s kind of the choice is actually ripped away from you, but we prioritize things all the time.
Donna: Absolutely. Absolutely family is a big priority, for a lot of us. Um, if we are parents, and our children are sick at school. And the school phones us and says, you’ve gotta come get your child. Well, it’s an absolute priority. We don’t go, oh, might do that later. We can’t, it’s a priority.
Family are our priority. And I think that’s the thing. We, we always find time for the things that we prioritize. It’s amazing. How in an afternoon, where, uh, this just happened to me recently had a full
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afternoon, a three hour, block of time locked in on tasks to do. And then a family curve ball hit well, I had to prioritize the family, so I made it happen. I made it happen and I also got the work done.
So it’s incredible. How you can really make things happen when you are prioritizing your work first and non-negotiable making it non-negotiable. I think that’s the key and that leads us to our next point. Make it non-negotiable like literally schedule it and show up. It’s like sit in the seat is what we are saying.
And it’s like compounding interest. You will get the benefit. Your business will get the benefit. Your clients will get the benefit when your business is elevating and you are elevating. The experience and transformation for your clients is also elevating. Everything is winning when you are prioritizing your business, because that’s the reason clients come to you for the experience that you are offering for the
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transformation that you are going to provide them.
And if that whole journey with you has been strategically and conceptually considered, because you’ve had time to do it. Because you’ve prioritized time to do it. Then the whole experience for them is elevated, which leads to trust, which leads to respect, which leads to repeat business, which leads to referrals, which leads to more beautiful business with new clients.
So it is, it’s so important to really prioritize your business, prioritize popping that CEO hat on prioritize getting that ass in the seat and doing the work. And if that feels a little bit like, eh, I don’t, I don’t wanna be thinking like that. Then think of it as energy, put your energy where your heart wants to be put that because wherever we bring our energy and we’re accountable for the energy that we bring to every situation, then wherever your energy is, make sure it’s where your heart wants to be, especially for your business.
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Kris: Are you suggesting that people don’t like the idea of like asses Donna?
Donna: Yeah, I’m thinking, I’m thinking, man, are we gonna offend someone with ass?
Kris: I was just thinking like, you know, cuz we don’t like halfassed anything, right? Let’s not be halfassed with our CEO stuff. We wanna have like full asses on the chair. no halfass well, you know no Half hearts or no half asses.
Donna: That’s right. That’s right. Honestly, I think everybody’s getting the point, right? I think we are all, it’s all quite clear what we’re saying here is you need to carve out time. You need to prioritize, it needs to be non-negotiable. You need to pop that ass, that heart and that energy in the seat.
For your business and yeah. And show up and be present. You know, that keyword that we, we, we spoke about a little bit earlier when you are fully present for your business, magical things happen. It really does. It’s magic.
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Your business elevates in a way. That will astound even you, I think sometimes when, when we really are completely present and things start to happen and things start to elevate and we are like, this is amazing. All because I showed up and I got the work done. Yeah.
Kris: And even if it’s just for an hour, as long as it’s consistent, don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s, oh, it’s just an hour. Why bother that hour? Like Don mentioned before that compounding interest phenomenon can happen, but with how your business is moving forward an hour upon an hour, upon an hour, it all compounds and you will be amazed at how far you’ve come. Then if you hadn’t done it at all, it’s just, it’s gonna work. And you might batch it all in one day. You might say, Monday is my CEO day, or you might say, no, I really think I need to schedule Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or whatever it is for you.
This is my non-negotiable.
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I’m carving it out. Let’s do it.
Donna: Yeah, absolutely. And trial sometimes. Trial it, so say, oh, I think, I think I’m gonna be most on fire in the mornings with this. So give yourself some mornings then give yourself some afternoons, top and tail the day trial that top and tail with say half an hour, 45 minutes and see how that feels. Try it on it’s your business, your way.
You’re allowed to actually play with it. And you’re allowed to say, well, this stuff’s not working. That’s not working for me at all. I’m gonna try something else. As long as you do, as long as you keep making your business a priority and trying on new timeframes, trying on new little batches of time, whatever it may be until you hit the pocket, where you go, this is me.
This is where I really feel really good. And I can be non-negotiable about this.
Kris: Yes. And so let us hold you accountable as well. Send us a message and tell us when your time slot is going to be, and that you’ve done it.
You’ve popped it into your calendar you’re gonna do it. So send us a DM
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and you don’t have to do this alone. We can help you. Oftentimes with this sort of thing. Accountability is key. We have found this with our own experience in business, having somebody who’s external to the business, our business coach to run things past, to get the needle moving, to get things done, we can help you.
That’s why we created. The academy, our 12 week group coaching, learning extravaganza, amazing thing we just love it so much. And our one to one coaching program where you will get private coaching with us unlimited access to us for a period of six months. That is absolutely gonna hold you accountable. And you will not know yourself and your business after six months working
Donna: with us.
Mm-hmm yeah.
Kris: So if you, if you are interested in any of that and you’d like some more information and we’ll link it in the show notes.
So where you can go to our work with us page.
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However, if you are, uh, listening to this on the fly, just send us a DM with the word coach in it or coaching. That’d be fine. Just send it we’ll know exactly what
Donna: know
Kris: Yeah.
We’ll send you a link.
Donna: Yeah, absolutely. We would, um love to hear from you. So we hope that you’ve gleaned lots of gold from that, and we hope the wheels are already turning and you’re thinking either. Yep. I do. I’ve got my time carved out. My business is a priority and I’m already doing that. So tick lovely validation, or you are thinking, okay, where is my pocket?
Where is my zone of genius that I’m gonna dedicate to my business. So whatever it may be all the very best with it. And we will, um, see you next time in our podcast.
Kris: Have a beautiful week, everybody. Bye.
Donna: Bye!
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