30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 6

Yesterday: clean up your inbox, organize your email. Unsubscribe from any mailing lists you don’t read regularly.

L-R: cleaning out the inbox and baby cuddles!

The instructions for yesterday's endeavor were relatively simple but good grief it took a long time!
Having a small babe has definitely changed how we get work done around here. The majority of this task took place on our phones while balancing a sleeping or near-sleeping baby on the other arm. It also hasn't helped that we're all slowly getting over a pretty nasty cold.

Be that as it may, it felt good to delve into the wilds of our email inbox after putting it off for so long. It's amazing how easy it is to flag an email as important and how hard it is to unflag it after the matter has been dealt with. We had soooo many flagged emails, it was ridiculous. Now that we've reduced the number of flagged emails, we feel so much lighter. We've also gone through and unsubscribed from a number of email lists that we rarely read. This was always such a pain, every time they would arrive in our inbox, we would groan and talk about unsubscribing. Instead of taking the time to unsubscribe as they arrived, we would always just quickly delete them and move on. It feels so good knowing that the added pressure has been removed once and for all. We also took the opportunity to send emails that we'd long been putting off. After this exercise, we feel rather virtuous. Now the trick will be keeping up with the regular maintenance!

So far, the tasks for this project have been pretty simple and relatively easy to deal with. Our main obstacle has been making sure to create the time to work on them carefully and consistently. But then, that is one of the main goals of the project, to become more organized and to get back to healthy work habits. So we seem to be on the right road.

Today: Sit down and look over your website critically. What needs work? What needs to be freshened up? What have you been putting off? Get to work, create an action plan!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 5

Day 5 of our 30 day small business cleanse!

Yesterday: Take a look at your social media accounts. Refresh your about pages, change up your profile pictures and cover images. Have you combined work and personal accounts? Does that work for your business or brand? If it doesn’t, then think about creating a separate account for each. Also look at the people and businesses you follow or like. Carefully evaluate who or what you can unfollow or unlike.

Our new Twitter design, including the profile photograph taken by Duran Castro for his blog The Diligent Hand. The background photograph was taken by Rosemary atop the Ace Hotel in DTLA on a very cold day in January of this year.

Yesterday's assignment was to breathe some fresh air into our social media accounts. We'd been toying with some new ideas on various platforms for the last few weeks but as part of this exercise we unified them all under variations on the same design.

We were particularly excited to finally use one of the photographs taken of us last year by Duran Castro during the photo shoot we did in our studio space for his blog The Diligent Hand. We like all the photographs that he took that day but especially love this one of us proofing prints while setting up the press.

We also devoted a great deal of time to tidying up our social media accounts. While we share a lot of media across different platforms, we've found it increasingly frustrating to look through them. We had never really found the time to systematically go through each and every person, page or business we liked or followed. There were a number of inactive or neglected accounts, an inexplicable amount of pages that we had no recollection of ever following and several accounts that made sense during our earlier and less focused iterations.

L-R: our blog yesterday before we refreshed our design and afterwards.

It was really interesting to sort through who and what we wanted to follow. It led to numerous conversations about who we are as a company and what our brand and thus scope of interest should include. As we've grown and shifted over the past nearly three years, we've assumed and shed several identities as a company. We've moved further away from our fine art studio training and are really learning how to function more in the sphere of graphic design and illustration. It was fascinating to see how our Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter feeds changed almost instantly as we pared things down.

As part of this task, we also closed down a number of profiles on social media platforms that never quite panned out (ummm, we still don't know what to do about ello!). We've always known that it's important to keep an eye on our online identity, but it's sometimes hard to find the time. Now that we've really gone through and streamlined everything all at once, it should be a lot easier to keep up with as we go along. And we look forward to utilizing tools like Twitter and Tumblr much for frequently now that they're much more manageable.

Today: Clean up your inbox, organize your email. Unsubscribe from any mailing lists you don’t read regularly.

This is one job we are definitely not looking forward to!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 4

Welcome to day 4 of our 30 day small business cleanse!

Yesterday: clean up your computer. Start with your desktop then move on to your files. Choose a file structure then implement it. You’ll be amazed at what you find lurking in unexplored corners of your hard drive.

L-R: our inspiration for the day, hard at work, how we really felt at the outset of this project.

Our assignment yesterday had us plumbing the depths of our computer hard drive. In the interest of full disclosure, we only worked on our business files and left our personal files out of it (or else we could possibly still be working on it today!).

This was not a project we were particularly looking forward to and we did make a last minute shopping trip to Target as well as spend a little time on Facebook and on the internet looking at memes before we buckled down. Then we listened to Ice Cube, drank some coffee, put on some gangsta rap and adulted!

When we finally got down to work, we were pleasantly surprised to find that for the most part, our computer files are pretty organized. Over the years we've come up with a relatively easy to follow file structure. However, there was definitely some room to improve. We ended up focusing on cleaning up file names and locations as well as resolving a few redundancy issues.

It felt good to go through and clean things up, it certainly makes finding things a lot easier since we don't need to do quite as much digging around for things anymore. All in all, it was helpful exercise, we feel like we're getting things organized and making our lives a little easier with each day of this project.

Thank you for all of the encouragement we've been getting from all corners, it definitely helps to hear!

Today: take a look at your social media accounts. Refresh your about pages, change up your profile pictures and cover images. Have you combined work and personal accounts? Does that work for your business or brand? If it doesn’t, then think about creating a separate account for each. Also look at the people and businesses you follow or like. Carefully evaluate who or what you can unfollow or unlike.

Don't forget, it's not too late to join us on our 30 day small business cleanse, here's our schedule!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 3

As we get to work on day 3 of our 30 day small business cleanse, we're starting to settle into a pretty good routine. Happily, this is one of the project goals that we worked out as part of yesterday's assignment.

Yesterday's undertaking was to assess your overall situation. Where is your business now and what are you trying to achieve with this cleanse? Make a list of goals for this project.

Our list of goals for this project, but first coffee...

In many ways, this gets at the crux of why we've embarked on this project in the first place. The past year has been erratic at best. Many of the work habits we had gave way to stealing moments here and there to get things done. This has led to a certain level of chaos. The first order of business then, is to get ourselves organized.

Our second goal for this project, is to clean out the dead wood. It's an opportunity to examine what we do and how we do it in an effort to figure out what is working and what isn't. To pinpoint our weaknesses and come up with strategies for dealing with them.

Third, to create healthy habits. Constantly working on the go is the obvious outcome of not having much of a set schedule for the past year. It was very difficult to plan very far in advance, and as a result, we were often flying by the seat of our pants. Working this way all of a sudden meant that things got missed, or forgotten, or done twice. By getting back to healthy work habits, we will be able to get more done in less time. The obvious and immediate reward will be more baby cuddles!

The fourth goal may seem the most obvious but important to mention nevertheless. Our main objective is to figure out the lay of the land. Where are we now and where do we want to be. This includes a year from now, two years from now, five years from now...

And lastly, our intent is to learn how to work smarter and not harder. We've been doing a lot of reading lately, and one of the things we've found the most helpful are the creative business blog posts by Sycamore Street Press. Their post 10 Steps to Working Smarter (not Harder) has been especially helpful since we find ourselves in a very similar situation. We're not able to maintain the crazy, all-out work schedules we once had. This last goal may sound a lot easier than it is.

All in all, yesterday's task was a good early step. It led to some really great discussions and has allowed us to chart a path that we both feel comfortable with. And most importantly, it's getting the creative juices flowing!

Today''s goal: Clean up your computer. Start with your desktop then move on to your files. Choose a file structure then implement it. You’ll be amazed at what you find lurking in unexplored corners of your hard drive.

Ugh! Wish us luck!

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 2

Well here we are, day 2 of our 30 day small business cleanse.

Yesterday's Task: Clean up and declutter your physical workspace. Clean off your desk, create a space to work over the next 29 days!

The assignment for day one was a good way to get our feet wet. We were lucky enough not to have to start out from absolute scratch. We were both really sick with a nasty cold last week, and as a result we did a mini cleanup early in the week in order to de-germ the studio. There were still a few piles here and there as well as some materials that had been shifted around from surface to surface for the past few weeks that were finally dealt with properly (there is nothing like a good deadline, and a little public pressure to help you get things done!). Oh, and miracle of miracles, we finally fixed the work calendar that hangs above the standing desk! It may seem like a small victory but it was pretty huge for us!

Our desks look much better after today's cleanup!

There's something about clearing your work surface off, washing it down and re-organizing it again that makes you feel like you have things under control. Like you're clearing out the cobwebs and are ready to get to work. Overall it was a pretty gradual way to get this project started but probably just the right speed for us right now.

L-R: We finally fixed our wall calendar (btw, just above the calendar are our very first experiments in letterpress, from grad school!) and afternoon baby cuddles as a reward!

Today's Task: Assess your overall situation. Where is your business now and what are you trying to achieve with this cleanse? Make a list of goals for this project.

Today's undertaking requires a little bit more consideration. It'll be a good exercise to help us put down on paper some of the ideas we've been throwing around for the past few weeks. Although we're over the moon that the little one is sleeping through the night, we do sort of miss those 3am nursing/pumping sessions. Not only because of the irresistible baby cuddles, but also because we often had great impromptu business meetings strangely enough.

30 Day Small Business Cleanse: Day 1

Today is day 1 of our 30 day small business cleanse. Today's task is to clean off our physical workspace. We've decided that means our desks.

Carving linoleum blocks on our desk before the concrete.

We've shared the same concrete slab desk for nearly six years. It's a desk we made when we first moved to L.A. It started off as a wooden desk, but after a few years as our linoleum carving station, it refused to come clean anymore so we covered it in concrete. 

L-R: the standing desk where Rosemary is working these days, the concrete desk where Robin is working these days. Both are clearly a mess!

At the moment, this desk is piled high with cards that need to be packaged, as well as piles of random things. We have a really bad habit of letting this area become a landing strip for the odds and ends that are important but that don't have a home of their own, mostly paperwork and packaging materials. This has become particularly bad since the baby was born partially because Rosemary has been camping out on the new standing desk. It's a lot easier to get work done there while baby wearing and during naps, it's just those few steps further away from the studio bassinet making it less likely to wake her up.

Today we'll be cleaning up both areas. We need to set things up so that we keep these spaces reserved for paperwork and not turn them into a magnet for random papers and projects. Wish us luck!

30 day small business cleanse!

The day our new equipment arrived at the new studio!

This time last year, things were going really well with our business. We were settling into our new studio space, we were working on our Kickstarter rewards and wholesale and retail sales were on an upward trajectory. We'd also just found out that we were pregnant. Ok, we weren't pregnant, Rosemary was. We were so excited, everything seemed to be going so well. And it did, for the first six weeks of the pregnancy things were fantastic. And then the nausea set in and made itself comfortable for the next six months. It was pretty rough. Suddenly we went from taking care of the business to trying to take care of ourselves. And in the end, the business suffered from the lack of attention. Not horribly, but just enough to quiet things down a little.

Our booth at Artisanal L.A., October 2014.

Fast forward to this year, we have a beautiful new daughter, Rosemary is back on solid foods, and although we're pretty tired a good part of the time, we're also really excited to be back at work. We have been making the most of our quiet time to work on our business. We've taken the opportunity to really look at what we're doing in order to make sure that we're working smarter not harder.

L-R: Robin printing Kickstarter rewards, Rosemary at Eastside Handmade with Ana from Love&Arrow, Rosemary proofing neon sign cards.

In that spirit, we've decided to embark on a 30 day cleanse. How L.A. can you get right? Inspired by the Apartment Therapy January Cure (which we've always wanted to do but have always been too exhausted since it comes right at the end of our busy season!) as well as several other  creative cleanses we've found on the internet or Pinterest (take a look at our Professional Practices board!), we wrote our own list of projects to follow for the next 30 days. It's going to be pretty intense, especially sandwiched between running the business, baby cuddles and marathon nursing session, but we're going to do our best! If nothing else, this will formalize a lot of the discussions we've had over late night feeds and early morning pumping sessions.

L-R: Robin taking a quick nap in the car while Rosemary feeds the baby, a stack of note cards hot off the press, studio hangouts with the baby.

We'll be charting our daily process here on the blog as well as sharing some bits and pieces on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Each day we'll cover our goal for the day and a small recap on the previous day's progress. It's a lot to bite off, and frankly we're a little nervous. You can follow along with us if you'd like, here's a pdf of our schedule for the rest of the month. It's tailored to our type of business but feel free to customize it in any way that makes it work better for you.

Wish us luck!
Rosemary+Robin