Those of you who are regular Paper Leaf blog readers will have noticed that we have been posting less frequently these days. The main underlying reason is a good one – we’re very busy – but the end result is undesirable. The past week I took some time off, and during that time off I was thinking more and more about the old adage “the shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot“, and how this applies to us a business (as well as many other designers and developers out there). Why does this happen? Why do projects relating to our business fall by the wayside, like the shoemaker’s shoeless son? The answer: we don’t treat our design business like a client.
What Do You Mean?
If we treated our own business (and business related projects) like we treated client projects, we would practice proper time management, hit deadlines, have a consistently fresh portfolio, and budget for the time needed per week to make these things (and more) happen. But we don’t – and maybe you don’t either. It’s tough sometimes – client projects pay the bills, whereas business-related projects have a more indirect benefit. Clients often give us some much-needed motivation, through phone calls or emails (hopefully motivation of the non-threatening kind), whereas we’re the boss of our business. Thus, we’re often putting client projects in front of our own, time and time again. If this stays consistent, however, our portfolio, print materials, blog and more will be an outdated reflection of our business. That’s bad news. Read the whole article >
