A parking lot, a playlist, and a fake meeting with Susan.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander and Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now, let's get designing your own success. I have had the most incredible couple of weeks, so yes, I had a little break because it was school holidays, but I also managed to jam pack so much time with designers, time with F workers that flew in from all over the country. I was so lucky to meet a lot of them last month, the design show. But then this month I did a keynote speech in front of over a hundred designers on AI and how AI supports our productivity and is a tool for. Creativity, which was so fantastic. And yeah, I went out for lunch with a bunch of. People that I know in the industry and just had some really solid conversations, really got a handle on what it's like out there. It has been a tougher year than usual. And I just love having those conversations and just checking on everyone and hearing what's up in different regions of Australia and comparing notes. It's really great for that. Even if you feel sometimes when you go to these trade fairs ah. I've put aside three days and I could probably do it all in one. There are other benefits that you really get from the community side of our industry. We don't come together as often as it seems. I can count pretty much on one hand the amount of regular networking events or things that I attend in person. So for me it's really special. I really enjoyed it. And if you are one of the girls that came on the behind the scenes tour, we went around, we talked to a whole bunch of. We talked to a whole bunch of people who were showcasing their brands at day decor and design, and really got it behind, like a proper behind the scenes. So we spent 10 to 15 minutes with each of the brands and found out, where are they based, what is the trade program like, what is the manufacturing like, where, what are the customizations available? How can we. Design things like it was really great. I felt like instead of just doing a lap and kind of going, oh yeah, I get the gist of it. I really got an intimate knowledge and so did the girls that I took on the tour of every single brand and we did not do everyone, like I went on the Wednesday night and arranged probably the top eight that I really wanted to learn more about, and I took the on a tour of that, so it was a little bit more curated. I do that every year. It is not just for my framework, it is literally meet me at the front door at 10:00 AM and you can come behind the scenes with me and get to know a lot of the stall holders and get to know the brands in greater depth. Put it in your calendar for next year at day decor and design if that's something you wanna do. And hopefully I'm on the main stage again next year, just putting that out to the universe'cause I had so much damn fun. Anyway, this is a quick one today because of afa mentioned school holidays and everything that's been going on. I am recording this. On Wednesday, ready to go live on Thursday, so I need to keep it pretty brief, but it's something I wanted to address for a little while because I actually get in a lot of discovery calls, a lot of people reach out to me and they wanna have private coaching, but they actually lead with. Oh my gosh. I have a DHD though. Is that okay? Like it's really hard for me to manage productivity in the way that other people manage productivity, or but I'm a hot mess express, these are words from actual people, not me and my judgments. If you've sat down with a fresh planner and you've written the perfect to-do list and time blocked all your day with all these beautiful, colorful labels, and then stared at the ceiling five minutes later, just. Feeling like a failure. Like hello, A DHD. This episode is for you if you recognize yourself in that. And also for all of us who are just craving a few fresh and flexible ways to address productivity. You are not disorganized. You probably have lived in a neurotypical world for a long time and felt as though if you can't do things in the way that everybody's doing them, that you are broken or it's not working well, and I am being careful here. There are no judge. I think we know that I particularly always design with neurodiversity in mind. I'm always thinking about how other people approach the world, how they see the world, and how that works for them. I am so sick of people just saying, why don't you try time blocking? Or, why don't you try the Pomodoro method? Because time blocking is not gonna work for everyone. It assumes that you can achieve static focus and that you have predictable energy and emotional neutrality at. Most people don't like, not most people, but a lot of people. A lot of the girls that I work with or the women that I work with need to feel their way into a task or to hyper focus for six hours and then crash for three hours at strict. Schedules are a trap for them. They're not going to work. I care way more about their rhythm and their being able to show up at all. Then the rigidity of routine and them having to do it the typical way. So I wanna talk about a few tactics and a few ways that we can. Be adaptable and we can think about approaching it in a totally different way. When I'm coaching, even in my group coaching, this is not just private coaching. I usually find out about this sort of stuff pretty early. Like someone will say to me, I have trouble with this. Or in the top three challenges they'll say, I really struggle keeping on task or productivity has always been a challenge. Or they'll just out and out say to me on the onboarding, like I, I have a DH, adhd. Is that a problem? Absolutely not. And so I am constantly looking for solutions to suggest, so I'm not gonna say straight away. Oh, that's fine. If you are not in the neurotypical column, then you're in the like neurodiverse column. And this works for all neurodiversity because it really doesn't, I don't even think square peg, round hole is a good analogy anymore. I think it's really, it needs to be customizable to every brain because we are such a spectrum and we do think so differently. So what we do inside of the framework and inside of private coaching is I really do wanna get a really strong working understanding of what sort of things happen with ease and what things are really hard because we can design the hard to become easy. We just need to know what it's all about. So I'm gonna give you some non-traditional strategies and teach you what actually works and what I'm seeing. But I'm seeing some success with suggesting inside of my paid containers, building a brain dump space. So whether that's like written voice memos, a combination. A blank notion page where you can dump images, ideas to-dos, everything like that. I actually find mind mapping or having an open double page blank or lined notebook, and then constantly putting all the little things into that. I really like the idea of voice memos, brain dumping, and even just having a there are projects inside of chat, GBT, and you can have a project called, my Second Brain. And inside of that you can have one that's marketing and content, one that's operations, one that's school, family, lifestyle, whatever. And then you go into that same chat over and over again and dump in ideas and things and build it out. You can absolutely do that, and it makes you feel a little bit more organized because often what we need to do is just get things out of our head and get them either on paper or just living somewhere else, but clogging our brain. I also have always hated this. 5:00 AM club, I get up at 4:00 AM I work six hours before my kids wake up. I just think it perpetuates guilt. Like I'm so fine for you to do that. I think that's great and for some girls that I work with, that will work for them. But that doesn't mean that's the only way that you can do things. And that doesn't mean that somebody else is not doing a good job if that isn't gonna work for them. Or I talk to people about building a start my day routine. So a playlist, the same playlist over coffee, or check the calendar. Something that will signal your brain into work gently, but something that is repeated every day. So this all stemmed, this idea stemmed from ashamed to say, when I worked in travel, I went on, oh, I shouldn't say ashamed to say because they probably paid for me to go on it, but it was like a tiki tour, might have actually been bus about around Europe. And so every time we got on the bus, they would play this one song. And now whenever I hear, I did a Kentucky tour around New Zealand, for example, and whenever they played. Slice of heaven, Dave Dobbin. I always think of that tiki tour and when I was in Europe on the bus about tour, we had this one song every time you get back on the bus. So it just starts to train your brain. And so if you are someone that finds it really hard to get into the day or to set yourself off for productivity. Build yourself a start my day routine. So a cool playlist, even if it's just the same one song that activates that with coffee. Check the calendar, make it like a four part process and do not deviate from that. Whenever you walk into your studio, you play the song, you have the hot drink, you look over your calendar and you triage your emails, for example, and that is it. You just do that same four things, and I promise you six months of doing that is giving your brain triggers to say, we're starting the day, we're starting. Activity. And then if you are overwhelmed by standard operating procedures, and I'm sure some of you have seen what we do in the framework express and thought, oh my God, they've got a library of 120 and it's really full on use this two minute rule. So if you do something more than twice, it should be recorded as a process. There should be a standard process for it. But if you're finding yourself doing something a couple of times you just. Do a quick voice note. Loom a checklist is amazing if your brain needs to tick things off. So if you use something like Trello, which we do build a checklist, that is a template that you can duplicate. So it's not about getting things perfect, it's about reducing the decision fatigue. So you can be like, oops, I have to do. This part of admin. So imagine like someone needs me to send the service agreement and the invoice, for example. And you might have a miniature onboarding checklist that just says double check inside of the service agreement, that all details, property address, and everything have been amended to the correct client. Raise the invoice in your cloud account software, save it to your Google Drive or CRM or whatever. And then get the, your email template from over here and attach the service agreement. And that seems really simple, but having that five or six prong check boxes can make it feel less like a huge job and more I know exactly the steps that I need to do this. So if you're seeing something that you're doing a few times, build a little checklist. Trello's excellent for this that you can create as a template or duplicate and just go through. I set up people's. Bespoke CRMs all of the time, and I definitely set them up differently if your brain needs to work differently. All right, so I mentioned how time blocking is the native enemy of people who just find it really overwhelming. I mentioned that time blocking can just be the natural enemy of people who just, it doesn't matter how color coded it is or how regimented it is, you can raise up against that. I'm a little bit the same. I have some. A lot going on in my calendar, and I still like to make it my own way. So instead of saying we're gonna do marketing from 10 to 11, we're gonna try to triage things in terms of their energy level. High focus energy, don't do this task unless you are in deep work mode. This is something like we're designing or launching a new offer. You don't wanna be doing that. Because it's green and it says, design a new offer in your calendar, but when you're not feeling good, if you said this task is gonna need high focus energy, you need to do it when you feel sharp, then you could drag it into 9:00 AM after your morning startup routine, because you might be feeling at your best at that time. Or you might do deep work later in the evening. So you might. Think I'll just get through a few tasks for today and I'll save that high focus energy task for this evening. So it allows you to almost do traffic, light coding, red tasks for hard or high energy focused tasks, amber tasks for mid energy, and then green tasks for your low hanging fruit, easy wins, and being able to tick off a bunch of. Screen tasks is so good for just saying, Hey, I didn't get everything done, but I'm making momentum and I'm definitely moving forward. So I mentioned tools like Trello. I find Trello is working really well with my clients that need this sort of attention because of all of the checklists. So instead of calendars and deadlines and. Needing a deadline to motivate them. They're starting to get into the habit of just seeing their progress through green ticks and being able to move through and knowing I didn't do everything, but I did do something. So I think that's the thing. You get into this paralysis where you feel like you can't do anything, and so just being able to make small movements forward, that's still forward momentum. I spoke to checklists, but I also sometimes will suggest, depending on whether this. Will work for someone and it might work for you. And I don't know where to start. Checklist. So sometimes executive dysfunction hits hardest in the beginning of the day, as I mentioned. So you know, trying to build that routine. But instead of starting from zero, if you have a pre-organized, I don't know where to start, checklist for those foggy brain days, you can just have check emails, reply to one thing, open Trello, pick one checklist, start a timer for 15 minutes. You are tricking your brain into beginning. So that's all you really need to do. Having that prepared for you can just be a really great coping mechanism. No one needs to know about it. You never need to feel like embarrassed about it. Everyone needs, there are days where everybody needs support to just get started. Now. Again, talking about something like Notion or Trello is setting up a later parking lots for tasks that you're avoiding. So not everything needs to be done now or yesterday, or even today, and your brain needs somewhere safe to put it so that it's not looming in the background and you're constantly thinking about the fact that you're avoiding it. If you put a, not now but soon column in Trello or a later parking lot or whatever, you can take the task that you are avoiding and just park it there for the day. And maybe it's called avoiding, but this still matters in notion, and you can just go and revisit it because there are times where you are highly engaged and you're really ready to take on those larger tasks. I liken it to toddlers. Those of you who have toddlers, there are, a toddler in an entire month can just pick at food, throw food everywhere, not really be that interested, and then have 1 48 hours where they will not stop eating. They're like, I'm hungry. What's in the pantry? I'm hungry. You're making bowls of spaghetti. Then they're gonna have a bowl of lentils, then they're gonna have a bowl of risotto, and then they're like, is there any cheese? And I'm like. What is wrong with you? You're just eating for 48 hours straight and then nothing for the rest of the month. So think about it like that. If you have a later parking lot, it doesn't mean you're never gonna get to it. You only need to do it once. You don't need to feel guilty about it and suffer every single day. It just needs to be done one time. Okay, this one, this next one is just something that I do natively or organically anyway, and that's default to voice memos when you can't write. So sometimes you can't bring yourself to write that stupid email or that. I could just get it outta the way, but I have to do a caption and then you overthink it, and then you write it again, or like you need to do a process, you need to do something. Just talk it out and chat. JPT is amazing for that, like the ability to just tap on that microphone and voice note it. Or voice, note it to yourself and transcribe it later. The point is to capture the idea while your brain still has it and your future self will be like, oh, thanks so much for that voice memo. But you don't have to sit down and write and exercise is so good. They say, get out, move your body. Do different things. Go for a walk and voice dump. That is the next three blogs. Later. When you're ready, you can take the transcription and work with chat GBT to put keywords through it, tidy it up. But for right now, if you can think it, you can chat it out. You don't need to be sitting in the office typing. The next one's around automation, and some of us are uncomfortable around that, whether it's from a financial reasons, security reasons, all sorts of reasons. Automating emotional labor. If you are someone that you can overthink client comms or proposal follow ups, or you need boundary reminders, you need other people to hold boundaries for you. You overdo the proposals, you overthink things, automate them, or pre-write your hard emails on your easy days, and save them as templates. Use a canned message to say, no work with R-G-B-T-A friendly but firm. This isn't an opportunity that I'm gonna pursue, or this isn't a good fit for our studio. Get used to saying, no, free your brain for having to people please in real time and free yourself from the pressure of just overthinking it, just going around and around in circles. Even if there's if you have a template and you get to say page. Slide 15 of the presentation and that whole slide is red and it has black writing saying this presentation should not be longer than 15 pages, so that when you are creating it and you're going from the template and you're getting in your head and you're like wildly off in la land and you're doing way overdelivering. You are getting these red presentation like reminders all the time being like, no this person hasn't paid for more than 15 pages worth of deliverable. Here's one that I was talking about yesterday actually, because I was talking to one of the school moms after school and she was saying, I had an hour free today, but then someone wanted to run through something for 15 minutes after the Zoom call. Then someone else called me because they had a client emergency, and I've spent my only free hour today helping other people, and I said, oh, that's so funny. Say for example, tomorrow morning I have a podcast interview and then I have a meeting in my calendar straight after. For Susan. Now, Susan isn't a real person. Susan is my time protective code, Susan is effectively just my scapegoat. So I put her before an interview. After an interview. I basically plug Susan in about four times a week. So no one needs to know. If Susan was a real person, I would have to make an excuse to get off that podcast interview and say, I'm so sorry she could be in the waiting room for all I know. I've had this booked in for a while. I've loved every minute of this chat. Let's go. So she just saved my sanity a little bit. Now I'm gonna do some rapid fire quick wins for neurodiverse designers. I'm just gonna give you some non-traditional strategies that will hopefully actually work for you. We talked about task parking, not task planning, but having your brain dump space, whether it's written voice, memo, whatever that is absolutely going to assist you. Flexible rituals, not rigid routine. So instead of that, everyone get up at 4:00 AM and do your thing. Build a start my day. Playlist. Do coffee, everything. If you do something more than twice, record a two minute mini process, a voice note, a loom, a checklist. It's not about perfection. It's actually just for you. So no one's actually seeing it. It's just like I have a mini micro standard procedure and a repeatable thing. I can just run off the TE checklist. And remember I said instead of saying do this from, a certain time period, 10 to 11, try this task is red light, high focus, energy, amber light, medium focus energy and green light, low focus energy. Quick wins. Let's go for the green lights. I get so many people apologize to me. And say my brain's wired differently. It just doesn't work for me. Notion is overwhelming, Notion is overwhelming for everyone. You can tame that beast, but it's really hard work. And that doesn't mean that you're doomed to disorganization. It doesn't mean you're always gonna be like, labeled. Not an amazing CEO, not an amazing business owner because you have so many other incredible talents in the creativity side that other people just could not believe, and you can multitask like no one's business. You can. Listen to a musical mashup. You can be drawing or doing 3D renders and having a podcast on and doing all the things it's actually incredible the way that your brain works. And you get to build a business that works for you the way that you want to. You get to design your own success and when you stop fighting your brain and start working with it, it can be incredible. It doesn't have to be really hard. You cannot keep applying a neurotypical strategy to a neurodiverse brain. I really hope that something here today has helped you. If it has, please share with a friend. Please jump on Apple or Spotify and give the podcast a review. It is in desperate need of some love. This is a plant that needs watering constantly so that other people can find this as one of the design business marketing AI podcasts that they need to plug into their weekly rotation. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you've found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designer. Just like you for your daily dose of design business tips, and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at Oleander and Finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www.oleanderandfinch.com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.