7 Work Habits from 7 Years in Business

In some ways, I feel like I am just getting started with this lil ol’ photography business of mine, but at the same time, I can’t remember life before it! Life as a business owner & entrepreneur is full of pivots. You, your business, your clients, & the industry as a whole all evolve over time. I’ve learned so much over the last 7 years of owning my own photography business & I’m eager to continuously grow.

Here are 7 things I’ve learned over the past 7 years of my business, in no particular order. I hope these will encourage those of you who own businesses as well or may even be thinking about starting one for the first time.

Tracking my Time

There is nothing more eye-opening for your business than tracking how exactly you spend your time on your different work-related tasks. In the world of entrepreneurship, time is money. You’ve heard the joke that entrepreneurs trade their 9-5 jobs for the flexibility of working around the clock 24/7. 🤪 But all jokes aside, our time is our most valuable resource & to make sure we’re spending it wisely, we have to track it.

I use a FREE app called Toggl that is available on desktop and mobile. Simply put, it allows you to track how you spend your time by organizing your work tasks into different categories. For example, some of mine are Emails, Editing, Blogging, Social Media, & Bookkeeping. You simply title the task you’re working on (“Writing 7 Work Tips Draft”), Categorize it (Blogging), & press start. The timer immediately begins tracking your time and all you have to do is hit stop when you’re finished or ready to move on to another task.

Tracking my time has helped me by

• giving me needed accountability to stay focused on my most important tasks

• showing me which tasks in my business take up the most amount of time

• helping me think through which tasks might need to be outsourced & how many hours I would be looking to hire that position for

• giving me clarity on whether I’m spending my time on the right things that are moving the needle in my business - it’s convicting to see how much time you spend on social media & then compare that to the amount of leads you get from social media, for example

I only wish I had done this sooner and recommend that every business owner track their time, too!

Run Financial Reports Regularly

I currently still do all of my own bookkeeping using Quick Books Online and it has worked really well for my business so far. However, whether you use an application like QBO or not, regularly checking in on the money-in & money-out for your business is not only a necessary task, but provides so much insightful as to what is working or NOT working in your business.

Similarly to tracking your time, tracking the types of work that are making you the most money & the types of expenses that are costing you the most money can help you determine if you’re spending your time & money on the right things.

Things I like to look into when I run my financial reports are:

• profit & loss overall

• which types of photography are generating the most (& least) amount of income

• which months of the year generated the most (& least) amount of income

These things help me assess if I’m using my resources wisely or if I’m spinning my wheels in the wrong direction. There have been times when I’ve felt like certain aspects have been so healthy, but then in reviewing the actual numbers, I realized I was wasting time on things that weren’t really paying off.

Setting Boundaries

As an entrepreneur, it is SO easy for work-life to bleed into personal-life & then all of a sudden it becomes one big mess with no clear boundaries. It’s a double-edged sword because the benefits of running my own business are that I can work from home, I can work whenever I want, I can manage my own schedule, & so forth, but the cost to those benefits is that work can often become a distraction from my family, keep me overly connected to digital devices, & wear me down.

My boundaries continue to evolve & become more rigid as time passes. As we’ve added more children to our family & our personal responsibilities have grown, they’ve become even more necessary.

Some work boundaries I’ve implemented over the years are:

• turning off all work-related notifications on my phone (email, social media, etc.)

• only scheduling photoshoots on particular days/times each week when I have pre-arranged childcare

• saying “no” to projects that aren’t in my wheelhouse

Unplugging Completely

Smart phones have made our work more accessible & convenient than ever - it’s amazing! But the other side to that coin of convenience for me is that I start to feel like I’m running on a treadmill that’s going way too fast & I start to feel out of control. With more that is made possible - the ability to instantly receive & respond to emails, to post everything we’re doing on social media, etc… - the more that I feel is required. And that’s just not true. When my phone starts to own me instead of the other way around, things are way out of balance. Taking complete breaks from certain apps & time on my phone in general has helped keep me sane in what often feels like the rat race of entrepreneurship in the digital world.

Regularly Reevaluate my Social Media Strategy

Social media can be a fun part of starting a business - especially when everything is new & fresh! But it’s so easy to get caught up in doing things on social media just because everybody else is or just because you feel like you “should.” My social media strategy has changed drastically over the last 7 years. If you had told me about 5 years ago that one day I would be taking full months of time or more off of social media, I would have panicked - won’t that destroy the business?!

Social media, along with my business, has evolved so much over time and what worked well at one point for both my business & myself personally has changed over the years. Reevaluating on a regular basis is a good way to make sure you’re spending your time (aka money) in the right places that actually make a difference to your bottom line.

Batching my Work

As a creative entrepreneur, it is so easy to get distracted by the many ideas floating around in my head. New ideas for a blog, social media post, styled shoot, web design update, new product to offer, and more pop in and out of my mind all day. But I have found that if I switch to quickly back and forth between different tasks, I lose a lot of momentum & productivity. I work much more efficiently if I batch my work in blocks of time.

Keeping a running to-do list & “idea” list of sorts has helped me with this, too. When something comes to mind that I’m excited about and don’t want to forget to explore later, I write it down so that I know I’ll be able to revisit it later.

Investing in Education

Each year, I intentionally choose some of kind of online education to invest into to help me sharpen my skills for my business. I have taken courses on photography lighting, business finance, social media marketing & blogging, & more. Sometimes, the education has to do specifically with my profession & sometimes it has to do with business management in general like finance or marketing.

It can feel hard to spend money on education when you’re watching your expenses closely, but I have never regretted investing into education because it has helped me grow, refueled my passion for my business, & sparked new ideas inside of me!

What are some of the greatest habits you’ve formed involving work? Share in the comments below!

If you liked this blog, you might enjoy some of my other blogs related to work/life balance!