The Weekly Glow Up: July 19, 2023

Jul 19

Welcome back to the Weekly Glow Up, where I share tips and resources that you should know about as a creative who wants to make money from their art.

Here’s what I’ve got this week:

1. ⚙️ Systems for Success: Managing Your Inbox

I remember getting my first email address in… 4th grade? 6th grade? Sometime around there. And the JOY and EXCITEMENT I felt getting an actual email from someone!!! 🤩

Fast forward to today: I’m doing everything I possibly can to limit the amount of emails I get.

As a productivity nerd, I’m fairly selective about what I give my attention. You have to be pretty special for me to stay subscribed to your email list.

(Which means I am SUPER thankful and humbled by those of you who stick around for these newsletters; if there’s anything I can do to make these more valuable to you please let me know! 🙏)

But it took me a while to whittle down my inbox and get to a place where I don’t have the dreaded red notification flag on my Gmail icon constantly hanging over my head 😥

Here’s my golden rule for managing your inbox so you can free up more brain space for more important things:

Unsubscribe, reply or archive.

Basically, don’t check your email until you have the time to actually deal with every single new email in there. Go through your new emails one by one and take action:

Is this a newsletter you never find time to read? Don’t just delete it, take the extra 5 seconds to actually unsubscribe.
Is this a real person or client you need to respond to? Do it now, don’t ruminate on your response and leave it hanging for days.
Is this something you need to keep for future reference? Label and archive it.

Some tricks that can help:

I like to set up filters and rules for emails that come from the same person (i.e. weekly newsletters), so Gmail automatically adds the label for me. Then I can read, then archive in one click.
You can also set rules up to label the email AND put it in its folder so you don’t even see it in your inbox - then you can schedule a weekly time to read all your newsletters, for example.
Boomerang is a Chrome extension that doesn’t let any of your new emails come through until you confirm that you’re ready to check them. It’s like an extra layer of defense against the temptation of checking notifications 😅

How do you manage your email today? Will any of these tips help you keep things more manageable?

2. 🧠 How to Avoid Re-creating Your 9-5

Something I hear about too often is creatives who strike out on their own so they can have freedom from their soul-sucking 9-5s…

Only to recreate the same environment in their own business 😅

It makes sense—we build from what we know.

And when you’re a first-time entrepreneur, you don’t have a model to pull from besides your previous 9-5.

Here’s how I’d suggest you avoid this whole predicament:

List out what you didn’t like about your 9-5 job
If those things exist in your business, ask yourself if they’re actually necessary, or if you just did them because you felt like you “should”
List out how you actually want things to look/feel instead
Create a roadmap of the customized systems you need to build in your biz that allow you to get to that dream state

If you’re already running a busy business and have a lot of projects and work going on, keep in mind it might take you some time to make system-level changes—you may not be able to reach the dream state of your biz overnight.

But plotting out a roadmap to where you want to go can give you some hope and help you see the light at the end of the tunnel to build motivation to keep going 💪

Did you end up re-creating something from your 9-5 in your own business that you want to get out of? Hit reply and let me know, and I’ll help you brainstorm how to get to your ideal state instead.

3. 🍵 Client Tea: Leaving Email in the Past

Speaking of email - I’ve been working with a client whose team was solely using email to go back and forth on project updates.

Questions would be asked multiple times because the answers were buried and lost in someone’s inbox.

The wrong version of a file was used or reviewed.

Links to assets and resources were impossible to find.

Email is not the most efficient way to communicate around collaborative projects anymore.

If you’re still doing this too, I would urge you to look into one of the many tools built for project management or collaboration.

I personally love Notion and ClickUp, and there are other well-liked tools out there like Asana and Trello too.

Any of these will allow you to create projects and tasks in a database, assign pieces to different people, schedule due dates, and leave comments that will notify other individuals when they’re needed.

Links and files can stay in one place.

You can ensure everyone’s looking at the latest version of a project.

You can set up views and filters so everyone can stay focused on their action items and due dates.

For this client in particular, I set up a custom Notion build that shows high level projects, ties them to quarterly goals, and breaks them down into individual steps/tasks to get them the exact views and workflows they wanted.

But it doesn’t have to be that complicated—a simple calendar view of what’s due when and who needs to do it is still better than a super long email chain 🙃

4. 📙 Food for Thought

I recently saw someone share this quote by poet and novelist May Sarton:

"A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used. Closing the gap between expectation and reality can be painful, but it has to be done sooner or later. The fact is that millions of young people would like to write, but what they dream of is the published book, often skipping over the months and years of very hard work necessary to achieve that end..." (From: The House by the Sea)

I’ve been seeing a lot of creatives posting about their frustration with people promoting “6 figure this” and “passive that” when it comes to business coaching and mentoring.

I’m never going to tell you that building a successful creative business is an easy, overnight process, or that there’s ONE simple formula to get you there.

There’s a lot of hard work involved behind the scenes. There are TONS of highs and lows. It’s never going to be that exact simple exciting picture you have in your mind from the curated entrepreneur pics you’ve seen on Instagram.

And confronting that reality can be painful.

But it’s also necessary if you want to move your business forward. And it’s worth it in the end when you realize the freedoms you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t put in those hours of work.