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It’s that time of the year again, spring has sprung and cleaning is afoot, or in my case about to be afoot. Last year I wrote my ultimate guide to spring cleaning both your physical and digital space. If you’re looking for some top tips or a bit of a checklist, give it a read.

 

This year, I’m talking all things business spring clean instead. As someone who’s launched a store and started taking her freelancing work more seriously over the last 12 months, I’ve found there’s a fair bit of tidying up I’ve been neglecting. So, I’m making my business a part of my spring refresh, and these are the things I’m planning on doing.

 

Chase those invoices

Unfortunately, I think everyone who’s worked freelance has struggled with late payments at some point. If you have to keep chasing it can be easy to start to lose momentum or feel like you’re fighting a losing battle. But if you’ve done the work you deserve the compensation. Embrace that spring cleaning energy and go chase the payments you deserve.

 

File your receipts

I’m not going to lie, I definitely had a bit of a freak out around tax return time this year. That freak out inspired me to be really great with my finances for about a week, and then duly forget about them again. In an attempt not to have a breakdown next January, this spring clean I’m going to sort through and upload all of my invoices*, and hopefully start a habit or at least make sure the first quarter of the year is well documented.

 

*I’m currently using QuickBooks and I really like it so far. Potential review to come next year once I’ve actually filed a return with their help.

 

Update your portfolio

It always seems to be the case that it takes more effort to get a piece up and shared in your portfolio than it does to make it in the first place. But it’s so important to show off your best work and what you’re loving making because clients only know about what they can see. So if you’ve got a couple of projects you’ve been hiding under a bushel now is the time to let them shine brightly. Or, if you start uploading and realise your portfolio has become unwieldy or includes pieces you feel are out of date or your style get all Marie Kondo and cut them out.

 

Refresh your bio

This is something I know I am particularly bad at, because despite writing about my opinions and experiences every week I pretty much hate writing about myself. But your bio is such an important part of your site, it lets people know who you are and sets the scene for your working relationship. It should grow and evolve as you do. So, sit down, make peace with writing about yourself, and show the world who you are now and update that bio.

 

Spruce up your social media

There is so much social media hygiene to keep up on these days. I only really use three channels, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, but even still it’s too much to manage most days. Have a quick review of your channels and work out what things you can do to make your feeds look better or that will make your life easier in the coming months. That might mean putting in some Pinterest cover images, setting up Instagram highlights, investing in a new scheduling tool or even making a content plan. Pick the two or three most impactful things then make them happen.

 

Make a log of what you’ve got

As well as cleaning up and updating, a spring clean is also a great time to take stock of what you have to offer, whether that’s physical inventory, digital assets or new knowledge. If you don’t know what you have it’s very hard to offer it to someone else. So ask yourself what can you use in your business going forward? Where is it stored? How can you make it more appealing?

 

Once you’ve done all of that you should have a clean slate to help you review and make a plan for what it is you want to achieve for the rest of the year.

 

Are you doing a business spring clean, or any other spring cleaning, this year? What’s on your to polish list?

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Have your eyes every felt sore, itchy, or tired, or even like they’re burning as you’re working? Have you ever suffered from blurred or double vision after long periods of screen time? If so you might have been suffering from eye strain.

Eye strain is relatively common, and it happens when you don’t take the time to look after your peepers. It’s something that’s often overlooked but so important, especially if you’re a maker of any kind because your eyes are one of your greatest tools. Eye care doesn’t have to be complicated though, here are 6 simple steps you can take to look after your eyes right now.

Eye Checks

First things first, make sure you go for regular eye tests. The NHS recommends that everyone (even if you don’t wear glasses) goes to get a check up every two years. But if you’re having issues, or lots of headaches, you should definitely go sooner. Eye tests are normally around £25 but you can quite often get a discount, or claim back through your work place if you’re in the UK. If you want to read more about why you should get your eyes tested the lovely Natasha Nuttall has a great post all about it.

 

Breaks

Take screen breaks. Seriously, take a break (not to look at your phone!). I know we all know that we should be doing it, but it’s easy to forget. When I got my eyes tested at the end of last year, the optician recommended going for the 20-20-20 method, which is to look 20 metres (or as far as you can in your room) away every 20 minutes for 20 seconds. Sparing 20 seconds doesn’t seem too onerous right? Then you can take bigger breaks when you need to.

 

Active blinks

Another regular bit of eye TLC you should be doing is “active blinks”. When you’re working for a long time, especially on a screen you don’t blink properly which means that your eyes dry out and the glands that keep your eyes fresh can get blocked. So every once in a while you need to do a really overacted blink, squeezing your eyes together as if you were 5 again and making a wish. You could even make this part of your 20-20-20 routine.

Find your best light

As well as those little tasks you should also make sure that your workspace is set up in the best way to look after your eyes. Ensure there’s no glare on your screen and that your desk is well lit to avoid eye strain.

 

Optimise your screen

Once you’ve optimised your desk set up, move onto your screen itself. Go granny style and increase the size of the text on your screen by a few points so you don’t have to strain to look at it. You can also increase your screen’s refresh rate to reduce any flickering that might wear out your eyes. Where you can reduce the amount of blue light you’re exposed to, as continual exposure to blue light can damage your retina. While, if you’re working on colour sensitive pieces it might be hard to change the colouring of your screen to something more in the soft yellow range, can always use tools like night shift mode on your screen which shifts the colour dynamics on your phone at a certain time to reduce the amount of blue light you’re taking in. Plus it will help you sleep better too!

 

Don’t get too close

When you are working on a screen don’t get super duper close. I know the temptation is real when you’re working on a really detailed piece, but try and zoom in, instead of placing your face 2cm from your laptop, and your eyes will thank you for it.

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We’ve all been there, the creative rut. In fact, I’d been stuck feeling pretty unenthused about my work quite recently, I didn’t have any ideas I liked, I was procrastinating hard and everything I was making felt subpar. I still feel a bit like that. I know I’ll feel like that again.

So here are a few ways you can engage with your creative rut and make it seem a little less overwhelming.

 

Embrace it

Okay, so you’re human. You’re not a machine, you’re a living being. That means you’re going to have to take breaks, you’re going to have periods of slower or no growth. Trees lose their leaves in winter, bears hibernate, people have creative ruts. So, embrace whatever’s going on, whether you have no ideas or no motivation and take it as a sign that you need to listen to what your body is telling you and accept you might need a little break.

Let it breathe

Linked to the point above, is the fact that sometimes we misinterpret impatience as a creative block. Cut yourself a little slack. Take the time to play around, and to find inspiration. Being bored and lazing around can be a good thing. Sometimes all you need is an extra day.

Run away from it

Generally, we’re not meant to run away from our problems. We get told over and over to face up to them and just get on with it. Sometimes that does work with a creative block, but sometimes you do need to run away from it, quite literally. Go on a run. Leave the house, the office, the country. Go do something different, be somewhere different. A change in scenery can sometimes give you a change in perspective.

Step back from it

In that time away from your desk, take a step back from yourself as well and have a think about why you’re feeling blocked. Have you been working on a load of client projects and not had the chance to work on something you love? Are you overwhelmed by a blank page? Are you over tired? Have you been stuck in a routine? Are you not doing work you’re interested in? Are you facing something else in your life? Sometimes, a creative rut is a symptom rather than the problem. Take the time to work out if there’s something else contributing to how you’re feeling, and if there’s something you can do about it.

 

Put it back in a box

Give yourself some constraints. Sometimes limiting yourself (time, subject matter, materials, style, colours etc.) can force you to be more creative. For example, I love Kevin Townsend’s  timed pieces, which then seemed to create a whole new style and way of working for him. Putting yourself in a box, is sometimes the best way to get out of it – what’s more terrifying than a completely blank page when you have no ideas?

Do you have any tips for people struggling with a creative rut?

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I’ve spent a bit of time recently talking about finding a focus for my work, a direction to grow in if you will. A big part of the reason for that new focus on, well, focus is so that I could measure my trajectory a bit better, and to feel like I’m developing. But I’m still not quite sure of the best way to measure my success as a creative.

Success is different for everyone, and so the best way to measure it is different too. But here are some of my initial thoughts around how to measure success in a creative context.

The method of measuring our success we commonly seem to turn to first is comparison – how are we doing compared to our peers? But unless you’re doing exactly the same thing as someone else, and starting in the same place, it’s very hard to find a group of peers who we can actually measure against. This is made even harder by the internet. With a whole world of other creatives out there, there’s no shortage of people you could choose as your peers, but that means the choice can be overwhelming, and even harder to make well.

More often than not, we (or at least) I pick a peer group who I see as better than me, or are more established, which is great for pushing you forward but not for accurately measuring how well you’re doing, because you might never overtake them. I’ve also ended up comparing myself to people making different work, for different reasons, with different circumstances meaning any comparisons I make are just assumptions, which, again, rarely go in my own favour.

So, comparison with others doesn’t really work.

In fact, the only person you can fairly compare yourself to is yourself. You are the only person who’s working with your specific circumstances. So why not just periodically look back at what you’ve made and see how far you’ve come. I mentioned in my recent post about sketchbooks about the importance of revisiting old work and even of revising old pieces. You could even rework the same piece every year or 6 months, and see what you can add to it that’s new. This allows you to see your progress, but it’s less about pushing you forward.

But what if you want to look forward rather than back all of the time?

That’s where goals come into play. Setting goals allows you to give yourself a challenge to work towards, which you can clearly mark as achieved. The best goals are based on something you can control and lie just out of your reach.

These goals could be quantitative or qualitative. So, they might be that you want to produce a certain number of pieces or make a set amount of money. Or, you might want to be doing a certain kind of work or have a certain skill. This gives you something to work forwards to, and something you can easily measure. But perhaps it doesn’t take into account the process of accumulated growth that happens as your progress, or the power of the process of making in the way that self-comparison does.

In the end, I think it’s clear there’s no one way of measuring creative success that works all of the time. So, perhaps, the answer is to employ a mixture. To set yourself a range of goals, whilst remembering how far you’ve come.

After all isn’t the process just as important as the outcome when you’re making things? The only way to measure that is how you feel at the end of the day.

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There’s been a lot written about how we’re being bombarded with more and more digital distractions. There have been studies into how it’s effecting our memory and attention spans*, and think pieces on how it’s bad for our productivity. But is digital distraction bad for our creativity?

On one hand, there are some people who would emphatically say yes. When it comes to making focused work being sucked into the black hold of related videos on YouTube isn’t exactly ideal. Sometimes you need to just focus on making something with your hands away from a screen.

Plus, if our tendency to just keep scrolling has shortened our attention spans, creating detailed or labour intensive work is going to be harder. We’re also less likely to have the patience to draft and redraft in order to make the best work that we can, and to shy away from the tough tasks that will require delayed gratification.

On the other hand, isn’t distraction where a lot of our best ideas come from? And isn’t the digital world just as big a part of our lives as the physical world? According to one scientific study the more creative you are the more likely you are to be distracted by what’s happening around you.

When it comes to brainstorming, the best creative minds draw from a number of sources including things they’ve picked up distractedly browsing Instagram as if by osmosis. The web is an infinite source of content and distraction, or potential idea fodder, and who’s to say that content is any less meaningful if it’s online. 

Digital distraction, in moderation, I believe, is good for creativity, at the idea generation stage at least.

But it can’t be our only crutch, and it is something you should be aware of, because it can quickly spiral into something negative. In short don’t forget to go outside, speak to people in person and touch real objects too. Finding out what makes your audience tick face to face is an invaluable resource, and fresh air and quiet is so good for you. That might mean limiting your scrolling time or actively scheduling in time to go for a wander without your phone depending on how your day works. But as with everything, balance is key.

How does digital distraction impact your work? Do you actively limit your screen time?

*Digital distraction might not have actually made any difference to our attention spans