Nicola Balkind

Community Leader

Getting Started

By

Getting Started

Everyone has an Achilles’ heel when it comes to work.

Some of us are great planners and terrible at following through. Others of us love jumping in and setting to work, but run into hurdles two-thirds of the way through a project.

Me? I’m a terrible starter.

To give you an example, I’ve been sitting here for 2 hours staring at the prompts and topics I had planned for the month, feeling utterly uninspired by the lot of them.

It’s not a procrastination problem, you understand. There’s no staying up overnight til an hour before the deadline. That stress is not for me. I just have a tough time getting started. It’s the way I work, and it’s partly motivated by fear. It’s also motivated by a fact of writing: sometimes you don’t know what you have to say until you actually start saying it.

Once I get going, once the momentum builds, I’m set. It’s revving the motor I have trouble with.

So how do I deal with it? When I was on the Cultural Enterprise Office’s Flourish programme earlier this year, I had a mentor, Sophie Kyle (hire her here). She told me to find a starter, and it has worked beautifully.

Sometimes it’s been intentional, like kickstarting a podcast called Bookish Blether with my brilliant friend Holly. Other times it’s been pure luck, like being invited by the folks at Skriva to run a Finding Your Voice Online Workshop.

Having a starter isn’t always possible. Here, today, writing the September blog posts for this website, the only starter I have is myself. Sometimes I have to call upon others to hold me accountable, and other times I seek them out.

Here’s someone who’s been (unironically, promise) helping me out lately:

So… where do you get stuck in work? How do you get out of it?

 

Making Time for Personal Projects

By

projects

I was planning to write about “Giving it Away for Free” – “it” being your expertise – but since it’s still the end-of-summer slowdown for me, I had a better, but related, idea.

Let’s talk about how to make time for your personal projects.

For me, one of the biggest challenges in freelancing / running my own business is dealing with downtime. There are reasons to embrace the uncertainty: it means that when you work hard, you earn more, and that when things are quiet, you have time to do your own thing. The tricky part is keeping your own momentum going when it’s most important.

All this to say that I haven’t mastered it yet. But I have written a book, kept my personal blog, weekly newsletter, and YouTube channel going, and sustained a podcast to 15 consecutive episodes during the past 2 years of running my own business.

Here’s my advice for making time for your passion projects, whether you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, or working on a side hustle.
 

Plan to 80% capacity

In fact, you probably want to plan below 80% – but it’s a start.

Planning to 80% capacity means scheduling in client work (or your equivalent) for 4 out of 5 days of the week.

For one thing, there’s plenty else for you to be doing with unbillable tasks: marketing, book-keeping, invoicing, even tidying up your office.

For another, you need to give yourself some of that good thinkin’ time – when you’re ALERT! – to devote to your own projects.

Give yourself a little leeway to ensure you’re not overworking and burning yourself out.
 

Prioritise your passions

Sounds obvious, right? If you want to make something for yourself, you have to make it a priority. But it’s also probably the easiest project to brush off. It’s easy to make excuses – time, money, circumstances – but you really have to give your projects that time and effort if you want to make progress.

Treat your project like a client: schedule it into your calendar and stick to it. Generally, Thursday afternoons are my work “me” time: I go to a café, put my headphones on, turn email off and get to work. If you have a way to signal this to yourself – for me it used to be a Thursday lunchtime yoga class – all the better.

It’s also wise to have a go-to project waiting in the wings for when you have some downtime. Client call delayed? Meeting cancelled? Quieter time of year? Make your personal project the first thing you reach for – rather than a book or the TV remote.
 

DON’T make Friday your projects day

I’ve got a feeling that folk won’t like this one… but Fridays just don’t work for me.

On one hand, Fridays are generally less demanding in terms of emails, calls and meetings. And this is all part of using your self-discipline. But personally, by Friday I’m burnt out, tired, lazy, and would rather go read a book than start writing.

As I mentioned above, Thursday afternoon tends to be my sweet-spot: it’s a good time to aim to finish up client projects, but gives me Friday mornings to finish things out for the week, rather than ending up taking a 3-day weekend. I look forward to it, I’m still alert, and it’s a great way to unwind from all the other stresses of the week.
 

Go all out: do it daily

Better still – and this is my strategy during these quiet summer months – give yourself a little time each day.

This could mean waking up early and devoting the first hour of each day to your task, or it might mean using your downtime as I suggested above. Think about the times when you work best, and what you can do to move the project forward during those envelopes of time.

If you can do 90 minutes before you get down to work on your paid projects, all the better. Robin Sharma calls this the 90-90-1 rule: for 90 days, devoting the first 90 minutes of your work day to the one project you want to finish most.

I’ve not quite committed to this one yet myself, but you know what? When I find time for my personal projects during the work day, I feel happier and more productive.
 

More tips & strategies

Smoe more ways of working you can try are:

One Thing Today: Michael Nobbs promotes the habit of doing one thing, every day, for 20 minutes, to move your creative life forward. | Sustainably Creative

The 90-90-1 Rule, in full. | Robin Sharma

You could emulate The Daily Routines of Great Writers. | Brainpickings

And finally, apply these tips on How To Do Like a Boss to all your works in progress. | Being Boss Podcast
 

Your turn!

How do you go about fitting your passion projects into your workday? What does the side-hustle look like for you?

I’d love to hear your answers in the comments, or you can shoot me an email and we’ll chat there.

Lessons from Small is Beautiful

By

Small is Beautiful

As I’ve mentioned before, I love working with Roanne Dods and the rest of the amazing team on Small is Beautiful – an annual conference for microbusinesses and freelancers. I consider myself a bit of both.

This year’s event took place on 17 & 18 June, here in Glasgow. I was live-tweeting the event – a process I really enjoy. There was so much to keep up with, and after a while it became a process of hearing great scraps of wisdom fly in through my ears and straight back out through my fingertips.

The event featured an amazing array of speakers whose talks were filled with brand new advice and valuable reminders.

Today I want to share some of the highlights of the speakers’ shared wisdom – and some things that really resonated with me and my own business.

 

Standing out often means putting people off

As James Greig put it: “If you want to be magnetic, you must be as willing to repel as to attract.”

There isn’t a big committee mentality among microbusinesses, but when striking out on your own it’s easy to cast too wide a net. The more you try to appeal to everyone, the more standard and boring you risk becoming.

Patricia van den Akker had another way of making the same point, saying simply: “More businesses should be a bit more like Marmite.”

Are you putting off the customers who aren’t right for you?

 

Your time is a precious resource

Leah Hutcheon gave a talk about the value of time. We talk about spending, wasting, running out of time, but as humans it’s our most precious resource.

She also debunked that quote about how Beyoncé has 24 hours in a day, too. Unlike the rest of us, she has help. She probably isn’t worried about getting the laundry done before tomorrow’s meeting. Remember that.

 

You can use your fear as motivation

On Day 2, we revisited Akiko Kobayashi’s Pecha Kucha talk, which she delivered at our event back in December. It’s entitled Do The Talk That Scares You. My subtitle would be Apply liberally when feeling afraid. 

Her story is a stark reminder about the power fear can hold over you, and how you can choose to overcome it, one challenge at a time. And it’s just beautiful.

 

On reading & writing

Fi Scott gave a daring talk about her experience with starting a small tech company in Scotland called Make Works. She discussed everything from securing arts and innovation funding to the pit of despair. There were tons of gems in her talk, but the one that stuck out to me most was, “When I panic, I read.” I relate, but I’m just as frequently paralysed by panic.

I also took a lot of solace and inspiration from James Greig’s talk on writing. He told us that writing is like time-travel – an idea I’ve been juggling around in my head with unending amusement. He shared advice that I often give my collaborators, and hearing it back was just as powerful: “Blogging isn’t really about writing blog posts, it’s about telling stories.”

James also shared a great Elmore Leonard quote: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Simple, effective, and it made me return to my old habit of collecting and squirrelling away useful quotes for anytime I feel under-inspired.

 

Small matters

One of the biggest themes at Small is Beautiful is, unsurprisingly, the power of being small and staying small, but doing work that has a big impact.

This quote gave me great comfort:

“From little things, big things can grow.” – Lucy Simpson

 

 

The greater context in which we exist as microbusinesses in a macro business world was also explored. Ruth Little gave us a visual metaphor of the capitalistic obsession with growth resulting in cancers and Godzilla-sized hamsters. Then Katherine Trebek summarised on the final day with these thoughts:

“We’re overexposing our communities & our planet to the wrong sort of growth: obsessions with big, with status,and with self. [We need to] build from the bottom up, cherish the small in a world obsessed with big.”

 

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received about running your business?

You can find out more about Small is Beautiful at smallisb.com – and keep an eye out for recaps and videos of all the talks coming later this year.

Subscribe to my newsletter

Categories