#WorkFromHome | Weekly Routine

During the early days of the Pandemic, we wrote a post about our daily routine to help ease the #workfromhome transition many of you were facing. It was nice to share, and nice to get some positive feedback too! Being self-employed and working from home is sometimes lonesome and, at other times, it’s an overwhelming experience. We like it, in part because our routines help us enjoy the process. When things get lonesome or overwhelming we have each other, our college kids, and you! Thanks for being here!

Not much has changed with our day-to-day routines, but we are starting to venture out again (hooray!) and that got me thinking about our weekly and monthly #workfromhome routines. One key ingredient to building a successful weekly routine is flexibility… more on that in a minute.

For us, the week starts on Monday. Our monthly calendar (free printable here) is a blank form. By shaping our week from Monday to Sunday, we keep the weekend days together. Weekends feel more celebratory that way. It reinforces the idea that there is enough time for the fun things in life and helps us maintain a work-life balance.

A great deal of our success comes from incorporating fun activities. We like to have tacos on Tuesdays, watch sci-fi on Fridays, and during these hopefully post-pandemic days, we try to go out once a week. Making fun a priority gives us something to look forward to.

Monday. It’s typically the busiest shipping day, as we have to make up for Sunday. We are also ferrying our son to and from college. He stays in town for school so, on Mondays, he and one of us take the mail to town. It cuts a day off of the delivery time and provides us with an extra hour to ship. In addition to shipping, we make new listings, chose what to include in the YouTube video, and restart social media cycles.

Tuesday. A quiet day, Tuesday is perfect for behind-the-scenes work. I photograph, film, gather b-roll and upload social media content. Charles makes new pendants, researches sales trends within P&R, and builds B2B relationships. We prepare your packages and one of us drives to the post office. Charles communicates with buyers through selling platforms, and I typically write/edit/post on the Pendant and Ring blog. Tuesdays are always good days because we are 100% on that #TacoTuesday business. When we started on this kick, I had no idea how many different kinds of tacos you could make at home!

#workfromhome #weeklyroutine #selfemployed #howtohustle

Wednesday. Every weekday is a shipping day and Wednesday is also inventory day. We check our backstock and tally needs for future bulk orders. We discuss the pulse of the market through world news, industry news, and news of sister industries that we read about (and heard about from B2B connections) over the past week. We brainstorm creative ways to expand Pendant and Ring and review any ideas that you have shared with us since last Wednesday. Charles places purchase orders with small suppliers and answers any selling platform messages, while I get the buzz going on social media and write/record audio/edit the YouTube video.

Thursday. We list, make new items, participate on social media, communicate with you on the selling platforms, and upload the YouTube video: adding captions always takes longer than I expect it to! Luckily, we have an extra hour for shipping. One of us takes your parcels into town where he picks up our son. I upload video clips to specific listings, edit as needed, and upload links to all the socials. Typically, I write a second blog post on Thursdays, but sometimes that’s a Friday task.

Friday. It’s #scifiFriday but before we can get to that… Did I mention shipping? We ship, engage on socials and platforms, look for any missed messages or emails, contact custom-order customers with updates, create new items, list at least one thing, then maybe write a blog post or rework existing listings. In the late afternoon, after the post office run, sometimes we see a matinée at the local theatre. This is the day we have chosen to go out. During the pandemic, we curtailed our outings and used skype, facetime, telegram, and other platforms to connect. We still video call with the older of the two college kids on Fridays. After the video call it’s time for dinner and a movie – usually #sci-fiFriday movies, but it’s not a hard and fast rule.

THE WEEKEND (not the guy who did the Super Bowl halftime show)

Saturdays require a little bit of work; checking for messages on all the platforms, emails, and socials, plus shipping. Then we head outside for some sunshine. Recently that has meant planting flowers, maintaining the trail, going to the Farmer’s Market, or working on the truck restoration. During the summer it means more of the same, or shadebathing (previously known as sunbathing) with a book or magazine, maybe going to the waterpark, or to the riverwalk, or to the lake. In the late summer and early fall months, we have some garden harvesting, orchard visiting, or maybe a day trip. During the late fall and winter months, Saturday is a full workday as we help you prepare for your gift-giving holidays!

Sundays are playful creative days with no shipping. On Sunday our goal is to have more fun.

Charles plays the guitar and I paint, or we make other kinds of art, or we fix what needs fixing at home or in the shop. We connect with family members or our local community. We check business socials and selling platforms but we try and keep work to a minimum. We have other things on our mind on Sunday including Super Mario Brothers: Lost Levels. They are not going to beat themselves!

As we change, our #workfromhome routine changes too. I’m sure things will be different when our son moves out, and different again after that. To be continually successful you have to be able to make long-term plans with 🗝️flexible steps so you can dodge unforeseeable obstacles without losing direction.