Now that I'm back from maternity leave, I’ve been pondering and tweaking how I prioritise my time. Everything has changed a LOT in AI and work while I've been off, and it feels like a completely different landscape. I'm not going to get into how scary that is as a freelancer and as a mother, that's a topic for another day, maybe…
For now, the practical bit. I've got one full day and two half days a week to work on my business. That might mean going out to work at events, drawing sketches, or writing my blog and doing social media (as little of that as possible!). It takes a lot of prioritising, and I’ve automated it a lil’ bit.
Step one: the brain dump
I LOOOOVE a brain dump. It's my top tip for overwhelm. Throughout the week I jot things down whenever they pop into my head, usually while I'm with the baby. Then at the start of my “working week” I throw everything onto paper, literally everything on my mind that I've got to do for the business.
Step two: effort versus impact
You've probably heard of the Eisenhower Matrix. I don't find the axes very useful, especially as one of the boxes is called "delegate" and who am I going to delegate to? AI, maybe. So, I use effort and impact instead. With so little time, I want to make sure I'm having the most impact and getting bookings or talking to interesting people. Better that than faffing about on my Instagram stories, which easily distracts me and is not useful at all…
Low effort, high impact is the low hanging fruit, the easy wins, and that's a great way to start my week. So I’ll clear all of those off first.
High effort, high impact are my big projects, and I chunk those down into little one or two hour tasks, because I struggle to concentrate on admin for much longer than that!
Low effort, low impact is not important but I might get to it on a quiet day.
High effort, low impact is the stuff that will probably distract me and that I know I don't need to do unless I've literally got nothing else on.
Step three: the apps
I used to be a mathematician/statistician/data analyst, and I used to work in tech, so I love a bit of nerdy software. I love organising everything and getting it all lined up. It's very satisfying!
Once my tasks are prioritised they all go into Todoist. You can rank them P1 to P4 and give each one a time estimate. Then I sync that with Reclaim AI, which looks at when I'm available (my 2-3 days a week) and automatically puts everything into my calendar.
I'm not saying I follow it to a tee. The rebel in me sees something scheduled in my calendar and thinks “no, I'm not doing that, how rude, don't tell me what to do, calendar!” But it's really useful as a gauge of what I've got to do and how long it will realistically take. How many days work is this? If I need something done in a month's time and I've blocked in all the tasks, I can see straight away whether I'm going to get there.
How it helps during illustration projects
This is particularly handy on a non-live project, where I can map out all the sketches, colour graphs, client calls and so on. It's quite piecemeal and hard to picture otherwise, so seeing it in the calendar gives me a v. rough gauge, and it's how I know everything will get done on time. If a live illustration job comes in, that usually takes up a whole day, so I can see how the rest of my work automatically gets shifted and rescheduled.
A quick word on AI, since I'm using some here. I definitely do not approve of using it creatively. I don’t like receiving AI sketches and I hate seeing AI posters in the community centre. I just think it looks bad, and real people can do it a lot better. I know a lot of really talented designers and artists who want to do that work instead. But, for organising my day, and for jobs that would have taken me bloody ages - like shuffling little Google Calendar events around to work out when my projects will get done - I'm happy to use a little AI tool here and there. As a mother with very limited time, I want my short working days to count so I can relax when I'm with my daughter and feel proud that I've achieved something for our family. I'd totally recommend the Todoist and Reclaim combination.
I'm taking on illustration work for the next few months, live and non-live. As you can see… I'm super organised! And I'd love to hear from you. Let's get you booked into this calendar!
