A Day in the Life - Home Office ft. an 'Enlightening' Technique

Hello and welcome to this week's blog post! My name is Rachel for those of you who are new, and for those of you who aren't new, hello again, welcome back and thank you for coming back to read this week's post! (For those new people, there's a new blog post every Friday at 4pm!) This week I'm going to give you a run through of a day in my life as someone who currently works from home as a business woman (are you allowed to call yourself that?) and also as an artist. Working from home means being very disciplined and being very good at time management, as it is so easy to let those 'ten more minutes' become 'it's only half an hour..,' and if you're running your own business and trying to be successful, those are the kinds of things that will get you nowhere. You are your own boss, which is great, because you can be a nice boss, but even the nicest of bosses wouldn't take it lightly if you were an hour late for work because you fancied a lie in! That being said, if I work until very late into the night because I have a project with a deadline, and I know I haven't got anything pressing to do at 8am the next day, I do allow myself to have that extra half an hour. It's about knowing when you'll have the time to do whatever it is that needs doing, and also making sure you have the time and energy to do it. I used to be in the very bad habit of pushing myself too hard, working long days on very (I honestly don't know how I functioned as a person) little sleep, and after a few weeks/months of doing this consistently and not allowing myself time to catch up, I'd burn out. These burn-outs sometimes took up to a few weeks to recover from, so in the long run, you need to look after yourself! Getting enough sleep compared to getting that project done might seem futile but in the long run it does pay off, and is most definitely worth it! Right, I always tend to go off on these long-rambly-tangents, so sorry, I'll get back to it. I work from home, and so if I haven't been up until silly o'clock the night before (or sometimes even if I have - just not every night - see above!), I'll wake up at about 8.30am, (after *ahem* several alarms) and check my emails in bed. I always like to do this in case there is anything pressing that needs urgent attention, sometimes there'll be an email from a client or maybe a printer that needs to be answered very quickly. You get the idea. So I tend to check emails and my social media sites, (only for business - honest!) make a note in my head about what needs sorting, before rolling out of bed and heading straight for the kettle. Now, I am, in no uncertain terms, NOT a morning person. A lot of people say this, when they roll out of bed at 7am looking perfect and speaking coherently, but I am most certainly (sadly) not one of those people. Caffeine is a must, and so the first thing I do when I get out of bed in the morning is to make myself a lovely cup of tea. A big mug of lovely tea. From there, I'll head straight to my desk, and make a sticky-note of the important things I've mentally noted from the email/social media checks I did in bed. On the same sticky note, I'll jot down some rough tasks for the day, what needs to be done today, what needs to be done by tomorrow, just a vague plan so I know what needs doing first and what I can leave until this afternoon. Any orders I have for printers or the like, I try to get done as early as possible in the day, so that any issues will come back quickly and I can resolve them, to enable a quicker turnaround. (I don't know if this really works or not in terms of the quicker turnaround time, for example, but it means that I get it done and then I don't have to worry about it for the rest of the day.) I'll answer any emails I have, respond to social media (business only!) and make any phone calls I have to make. (I'm going to be completely honest here - I usually do all of these tasks in my pajamas.)

Once all these important tasks are taken care of, it's time for me to get ready for the day, have some breakfast, and have a little break where I can check my personal social media, watch something while I have breakfast, read, or what have you. It's usually around half 10 that I get these things done, so now dressed and ready, (hopefully now looking more like a human and less like a zombie - this usually corresponds with my sleep/caffeine intake, though, and not whether I'm dressed or not) I move onto sorting out any orders I have to package, cards I have to make up, packages that have arrived that need opening, sorting, pricing, you name it. This is where my business partner Deborah comes in, she takes care of a lot of these tasks for me, she's a lot more organised in that sense than I am! Now, especially at this time of the year, I tend to have commissions to be getting on with, and so at the moment, a lot of my day is occupied doing those. They tend to be week-long (or longer, depending on the customer and the piece) operations and so 'a day in the life' in November is very different to 'a day in the life' in January. So, my next task of the day is usually all about commissions, and if not commissions then my own artwork. I'll usually get myself a lunch prepared and take that with me to my desk, and then get on with painting, nibbling at lunch throughout the afternoon. As I've said before, painting is great, and so this section of my day can magically become my entire day without me ever even noticing. I tend to slip into some sort of zen state where time doesn't really exist, measured only by how low my candle has burned in what I perceive to have only been a short time. Now - the enlightening technique I was talking about in the title. If you read last weeks post, I described the process of creating a piece, traditionally and digitally. I skipped over the part where I transfer my rough sketch to a larger piece of paper, the professional grade watercolour paper I usually opt for. This is because I cheat a little bit. I don't have a light box, which is what I presume most other artists would use to complete this part of the process, and though I've seen many use a window, that method doesn't really suit me either. So, simply, I take a photograph of the rough sketch on my phone, send it to myself via email, open it up on my laptop, and trace the zoomed-in sketch onto some printer paper. From there, I will shade in the back of the printer paper, on the other side (overleaf) of the sketch using a 5B or so pencil (heavy, thick pencil!) sort of like I'm using tracing paper. Then simply draw over the sketch with the printer paper pressing down onto the watercolour paper. I usually make sure the paper is held firmly in place with some masking or painters tape - this avoids the printer paper moving whilst you're sketching! Who needs a light box??

Mid afternoon, I'll tend to have a break, get snuggled up and read a book or watch something for half an hour, mainly for my eyes, staring at a picture for so long can genuinely make you (and especially me) a little bit mad, and also sometimes it's very hard to look at your own work objectively for so long, maybe it's just me but I tend to lose perspective a little bit. So taking breaks is always good, and it's always lovely to snuggle up with a hot chocolate! However, it's also very important not to become a hermit (easier said than done) when you work from home, so sometimes in one of the breaks or before I start for the day, I'll go for a walk, pop to the shops, etc. Then carrying on with the art I've been doing that day, and then dinner time! Depending on how busy I am, this can sometimes be the end of my working day, or sometimes I'll have dinner, have a 2 hour or so break, before heading back to work! For example, I have had a very busy week this week and so I am currently writing this blog post at 10pm on Thursday night... Finally, to round off my day, (sometimes this happens at 6pm, sometimes at 11pm) I like to go back to the sticky note I made earlier in the day, and (in a very satisyfying way) I check/cross out all the tasks I've completed, and make sure anything I noted that needed to be done that day, I actually got done! Anyway, that's about it, a day in my Autumn/Winter (hermit) life, I think I'll write another day in the life post based on a Summer day, where I do craft fairs and a lot more outdoor activities! I hope you enjoyed this post, I hope it made sense - this post is a little bit rushed, I won't lie to you - but I hope it was enjoyable none-the-less. Thanks for reading, Rachel x