Life Gets in the Way.
We are all dreamers, planners and adventurers, but how many times do our dreams, plans and adventures get put on hold because our day-to-day routines and lives get in the way!
I drew up a plan for my business in November 2021, but unfortunately what you can’t allow for when you draw up these great plans and ideas is that your attention is needed elsewhere and your time is swallowed by the first priority in your life - your family.
Family has to always come first and although you still have to dedicate a portion of your time to your business, it may be a lot smaller portion than you had planned and all those dreams and plans have to go on hold until you can allow more of your time to those great ideas you had.
For me, the whole point to growing and building my arty crafty empire is to create a better life for my family and it is a means to an end, a goal to achieve, but never at the expense of my family. That is the balancing act you find yourself facing everyday to have the successful business whilst having a life outside of it that you spend with those you love.
Things have to go onto the back burner to allow you the time you need to take care of your family and hopefully you can eventually come back to them at a more suitable time, when you can give them the time you need to to make them successful and worth doing. Artwork is no different in that respect than any other job or business and with most things in life, to do them well you need to be able to focus on them and give yourself to the job at hand for you to do it justice.
On top of that, things always end up taking longer than you think. A piece of artwork always has the potential to take twice as long as you plan it to because you either can’t focus on it enough (the mojo isn’t flowing), or you end up so wrapped up in it that you put far more into it than you had planned and you add more detailing than you originally had in mind. The time spent on a piece of artwork can be an unknown entity in itself and the more time you end up spending on one piece automatically has an effect on the next piece and if you are working on commissioned work rather than your own creations, there is always a customer wanting to know when they can have the piece of work they are commissioning you to do and might not be very understanding if your run over the timeframe you suggested.
My commission bookings were lined up to take me through to the end of July, but with one week left to go of June I am fully aware that I am a whole two to three weeks behind and that will mean that the next piece that I should be finishing at the end of July will now be run into September, because it can’t be allowed to effect the wedding work I have booked in for mid August as that has to be completed for a set date. So I am left to apologise profusely to those whose pieces are delayed and hope they are understanding enough to not cancel their orders. But also in the back of my mind is that the orders for Christmas usually start to come in by the end of July and that work will fill up every hour of my time from the beginning of September right through to Christmas week. Stress levels are rising even though I do always say to the customers that the timeframe I give when they commission a piece of work from me is only a suggestion and might very well take longer than predicted and all the while you have to make sure you are balancing the work and home life in the right proportions to make your life a happy and enjoyable one. What a nightmare!
These are the joys of my Arty Crafty Life.