Delores Naskrent: [00:00:00] Hi friends and welcome back to the Creative Juggle Joy podcast. I'm Delores, and today's episode is for artists who are juggling a lot creative work, teaching products, maybe some behind the scenes planning that just keeps everything going. We are gonna talk about the practical systems like batching and routines that make it possible to work efficiently without losing the creative part of the work.
I am often asked how I manage to do so many things at once. I'm producing projects, I'm creating my own art creating my own art for licensing.
I am teaching. I'm recording classes. I'm running the membership, and this year hosting monthly workshops. The short answer is that I do not do everything at once. The longer, [00:01:00] more useful answer is that I rely heavily on batching and planning ahead and routines that support the way I actually work.
So today I wanna walk you through the concrete methods I use because this isn't about motivation at all, it's about structure, and it took me quite some time to work it all out. So a big turning point for me came a couple years ago when I was, I guess at the beginning of the. Coaching with Bonnie Christine.
I had done immersion a couple of times and. I got to know about Lisa Jacobs. Now, Lisa has developed a workbook. She's actually got several workbooks, and I bought a planning workbook by Lisa called Your Best Year. She's got a couple of versions of this. There's a business one, there's a life one. [00:02:00] There may be more, but it's just a really simple workbook and it helps you.
To do the process that has forced me to put everything I was juggling down on paper. Even that commitment of just writing it all down was a little bit hard for me to follow because I'm usually pretty scattered, but I really forced myself to do it this time, and it wasn't just. About goals and dreams, although that's included in the book.
These were actual commitments. So I started to write down things like the classes, the products, the teaching, the creative work, personal things that came up, everything that was happening on any given day. I would just quickly jot it down in this workbook. I found that's what was useful about the workbook.
Is it. Gave me that spot to record stuff. [00:03:00] Now I also use a planner, so of course in my planner then I had like specific dates for the things that we were working on in the membership, for example, or my signature classes or my card challenges. All of it got written down either in one book or the other.
Once I could see it all in one place. Patterns really started to emerge. I could see what was realistic and what wasn't, and I could see what needed to happen every year and what could be optional or just absolutely couldn't be done at the same time as something major was going on. And you know what?
That was the clarity that changed everything. So what I did last year is I took everything a step further and recorded as much as I could into my planner, my actual monthly planner. So I wasn't using that workbook as [00:04:00] much. I was working on my planner and I was putting in. A bunch of stuff, not just deadlines, but things like the time it took to record a whole bunch of stuff, or the time that I was teaching and I couldn't possibly be recording.
I had to work in the live sessions, which we had with three different classes. So with the foundations for each, I had to have eight weeks available. To do the actual live sessions and prepare for them. And in the summer, the mastering Surface Pattern Design course. All of that recorded in that planner gave me a realistic view of how things.
Actually how long things actually take. So that was the thing. It was not so much knowing those things were happening, but also knowing how long the planning took for each of those. And if you don't track it, it's so easy to [00:05:00] underestimate. Like literally would not have recalled from the previous year the fact that it would take me X amount of hours to just.
Review what I had. That's something that I have to do is I have to rewatch a lot of it or listen to it or look at my print materials to see if it's still gonna be okay for the following year. So this year my planning went even deeper inside my coaching group with Colleen Underwood. I know I've mentioned it before.
We worked through a full series of annual planning exercises. The focus, this time wasn't on doing more, but on sequencing things properly. Once I had all of my 20, 26 dates finalized, which Kaylie and I worked through really carefully, and Abbie, I had a complete framework for the year, and that framework is what has made everything else possible.
[00:06:00] Here's where things get very practical once the dates were locked in. It's crazy, but I literally dictated my entire calendar into ChatGPT I dictated everything in the goal planner that I had with Lisa Jacobs. I dictated everything I had in my last year's planner, so two planners, Lisa Jacob's workbook.
The work that I did in the Mastermind with Colleen, all of that information was this huge block of dictated text in chat GPT. And what chat helped me do was to figure out a structured annual plan. It worked in a runway or ramp. For the weeks leading into [00:07:00] launches. 'cause that was one of the things that I literally was saying out loud as I was dictating.
I was looking at those particular events and saying, I remember that this took at least three weeks of pre-planning, or we need time to create or check the sequences in our. Email campaigns. So I asked it to make sure that those things were included within this planning so that we'd have time buffers and these time buffers.
I also used for recording 'cause I knew I needed more time than what I had done for the previous years with the affinity Designer foundations. For example, this past fall when I ran it, I was recording still. During the running of the class and that was not ideal. That was actually [00:08:00] quite stressful and I know that I don't want to do that again this year.
So I'm building all of that recording into periods of time when we have a little bit more breathing room. So yes, time buffers for recording was very important for me. For you, it may look like something completely different. But also. Working in enough lead time for promotion and email sequencing. That's something that's really important for me, but also critically important for Kaylie as she takes on more clients and works more on her membership.
So we need time to go through that stuff, but we need to be doing it weeks before, not the week before, if it's really. Critical that the week or two before the actual launch of a course is left open for last minute things [00:09:00] emergency things, new things that I'm putting in, but not for the things that could have been done weeks before, if that makes sense.
I think that this step alone is gonna remove so much friction. For both Kaylie and I. So instead of constantly asking what's next, I can focus on executing what has already been decided. I love to be able to check things like those email sequences well in advance, because then I do also have time to make changes to them if something comes up.
For example, this year we decided to add. An alumni portion to the Affinity Designer Foundation. So anybody who took foundations last year could opt to come back in and be involved in all of the live sessions, but have additional projects to do [00:10:00] besides what was there last year. So those things we worked in and we just.
Crazily tried to record and create that stuff as the course was going on, and that was just way too stressful. So I was that person who used to really hate routines. I.
I wanna talk about why I've changed my mind about routines. Yes, I used to hate them or I used to think I hated them. I found that they felt restricted and they felt boring. But now I'm convinced that routines are what make creative work truly sustainable for me. When I know when I need to record, when I need to teach.
When I need to promote and when I need to create, I stop wasting energy deciding, and you start, and I [00:11:00] know if you're like me, you start using that energy to actually do the work. So for me, routines don't limit creativity, they protect it and they make it possible. I can't tell you how much relief I am feeling right now because I have been doing all of the batching of my content and I've been doing it for several weeks.
You may not hear this until well after the fact, but I've spent most of December and January working on batching. So batching is the backbone of. Everything. Batching is the main strategy that makes all of it work. When I'm recording, I record. When I'm teaching, I teach, which of course is also recording what I'm planning.[00:12:00]
I plan. So a very good example of this is something new that I decided to do this year and I knew. Absolutely knew I could not sustain doing this every week of the year. And that's to do 52 Affinity Designer foundation's YouTube videos crazy, right? Imagine me stopping every single week to record this little video.
Just a short video. But can you imagine if I had to do that every single week?
Instead, I planned it all out. I did things like grouping similar lessons. I recorded in three or four focused blocks.
Once I had them all recorded, then I processed them with Descript, which helps me to get the [00:13:00] transcript. That's all I really use it for. And then I used those transcripts, I entered them all into chat, GPT, and I worked out. All of the intros and all of the outros, which are the conclusions to each video, and also used it to double check and make sure that I was teaching in a continuum, which is one thing I really wanted to do so that new users of the affinity designer program could start from the very beginning even if they had never ever used the software and could follow along week by week and learn just one focused skill at a time. So that was a huge accomplishment for me and I'm really happy it's all being edited right now by my daughter. She is getting it [00:14:00] all ready to go.
We have everything worked out so that she can even do all of the uploading and. Decking it all out on YouTube. So I used chat GPT to help me. I produced a huge spreadsheet and it's all organized now, so I really don't even have to think about it for the year. Of course, I will get them back in batches from her to just double check her editing, not because she is.
Not capable of editing the classes fully, but I like looking at them to make sure that they all make sense. She doesn't know Affinity Designer as well as I do. She actually doesn't use it, but she feels like she knows how to use it because she has recorded or edited so many of my recorded classes. But I do definitely always double check everything before it goes out.
Now I also [00:15:00] wanna talk to you a little bit right now about the fact that producing projects alongside teaching is possible. In other words, I wanna be clear that teaching doesn't replace my own creative work. I actively produce projects and continue creating art for licensing. The same systems that support teaching also support that creative output.
When your structure is solid, your art doesn't get squeezed out. It actually gets protected. As as I create these classes, I'm doing actual projects. A lot of the projects I do in the classes will become sellable work that I will. Try to license. So that's one of the things I really like about my school, and teaching you all is that you are sharing in my life's work.
[00:16:00] It's really cool and I am so thankful that I can do this.
Okay, I want you to know what doing it all actually looks like from the outside. It may look like a lot from the inside. It looks like making decisions early. Systems that remove the daily guesswork, batching similar work and routines that keep things going. It's not about speed. It's all about alignment.
Yes, I am a fast worker, and that's because I know my software inside and out. I can produce artwork quickly, but recording can only take as long as it does. You can't record faster in any way. You can just plan it better so that it goes faster. But even a podcast episode like this. [00:17:00] It takes whatever the amount of time is.
If it's a 15 minute episode, it takes 15 minutes or more to record it, and of course it has to still be edited, but I'm working in batches for this as I do with everything else. If there's one takeaway from today for you, it's this. You don't need better discipline. You just need clearer containers. Once your work is organized in a way that matches your energy and priorities, efficiency becomes a natural result.
Thanks so much for spending this time with me today. Keep creating, keep juggling, and most importantly, keep finding joy in the process.
