[Replay] Avoid mistakes and grow your photography business

[00:00:00] Speaker A: July is such a great time to relax, catch up on things, and not have anything scheduled. So the podcast is airing reruns of episodes that you might have missed. The ads might not be completely relevant in terms of dates, but if you want to know how I can help you, you can always dm Megwilkolnas on Instagram, that's Ingvild Kolnese. Or go to engvilcolonist.com waitlist and sign up there to be the first to know what's happening. [00:00:33] Speaker B: Hi and welcome back to sustainable photography. I am so excited to start making new episodes. I didn't actually want to take any time off, like not at all because I want to do everything all at once and I want to be present for you weekly. But I I also needed some downtime because while I love creating this content, there's just so much more to it. The episodes have to be outlined and maybe even scripted. They have to be edited, show notes have to be created, and emails have to go out. And by setting up some replay episodes, I've been able to relax a bit and return now more than ready to keep it up. It is a bit of an adjustment, though, which I'm sure you can relate to after being away for some time. And today we're talking about how you can create that balance in your life and your business. Because for most of us, work can just take too much from us, and the idea of designing your business to fit around your life seems impossible because there's always more to do. And I want to talk more about what you can do to feel less overwhelmed. You're listening to sustainable photography, a podcast all about business tips, inspiration and confidence building. I'm Inguil Kolnes, the host of this podcast, and after over a decade as a photographer, I now help talented photographers run sustainable businesses. And for full transparency, you should know that I'm a mentor with paid offers, and I will probably mention some of those in this episode. When you run your own business, there's a never ending list of things that you can and feel like you should do, and everything can seem equally important, and you might feel overwhelmed and stressed. And that's how I feel anyway. Maybe I've said yes to too many things at once, or things have taken longer than I thought they would, and I'm left with too much to do. But it's not possible to do everything at once. You can only do one thing at a time. So the thing that works for me is to write it all down, every single little thing, and from there you can do a few different things. Either start with some of the small things, the things that will just take a few minutes to get out of the way to gain some momentum, and then maybe you can ask yourself out of everything on the list. If you can only do one, which will make the biggest difference in your business or which is the most urgent that you just have to do right away. Because so often we do things out of habit without considering if it actually has a purpose. And so often we do client work first because it can become a bit of a mental burden. Doing client work is of course, very important, but instead of tackling that first, I recommend that you set aside specific days to deal with it and give yourself a long delivery time so that you always have time to focus on your business. But maybe when you look at your list, you'll see that actually the thing that is most urgent and the thing that can't wait is client work. So of course get to that first. Okay, but take a look at your list and I, with everything that's on there, choose the one thing to start with, and then once that's done, you can choose what to prioritize next. I've tried different strategies with this, and one that's worked very well for me has been to write down each item on a separate post it so that I can see only one thing at a time, and that way I won't get distracted by seeing all the other things. Those are my main strategies when I'm in the midst of what feels very chaotic. But really, I urge you to take a step back and start long term planning. Decide on what matters most to you and structure your life and business around that. And at the end of October, I'm setting up another plan. Your best year. Yes, mini workshop where we'll plan out 2024 together, just like we did last year. For 2023. You'll get all the details when it's ready to go. But in the meantime, write down all your non negotiables, everything that you can't not do. And one thing you should count as a must is time off. Time with your family, time just for you. Maybe you need more sleep, more time outside, more time with your kids. And that's the most important, because something that you might notice when you start thinking about it is that things take the time you have available. If you suddenly get sick or something comes up, it'll still be okay, you'll still get new clients, you'll be able to deliver work, and the world doesn't come to an end. When I took a few months off last year. I still got new clients. I still managed to get the most important things done, and what I didn't do that was probably the things that weren't that important. Right now I have so many things that I want to do, but I can't do them all. So I have to choose. And most of the things I want to do but don't have the time for. No one knows about it, so it doesn't really make a difference. Still, I hope to get them done, but I've chosen to make new podcast episodes over posting daily on instagram. I've chosen to set up more sessions for my group program over updating the course platform. I want to do it all, but that's not an option right now. And I guess the main challenge might be to be okay with things not being perfect and not being done, because things won't ever be perfect and there'll always be more things you can do. You just listened to an episode of sustainable photography. Please share this episode with the photographer you care about.