Kick Back & Start Up

Kick Back <span class="amp">&</span> Start Up

Whether it is ren­o­vat­ing a tired a room in your house or tak­ing the steps towards cat­a­pult­ing your busi­ness to the next lev­el, we have some advice on how to go about mesh­ing relax­ation and moti­va­tion. All of us busi­ness own­ers and hus­tlers know that it is so easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of our career life — between man­ag­ing clients, main­tain­ing our online pres­ence and work­ing on get­ting new busi­ness, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. On top of our career, we have fam­i­lies, social lives, hob­bies and every­day activ­i­ties that we are some­how expect­ed to jug­gle. Sound famil­iar? Have no fear, the ladies of the DSA are here! After lit­er­al­ly decades of deal­ing with what we just explained, we have picked up a trick or two along the way.

Getting Real … Real Relaxed 

Rather than sweep­ing gen­er­al­iza­tions, we decid­ed to get con­crete exam­ples from our very own train­ers. Car­ol Bass, also known as The Prac­ti­cal Dec­o­ra­tor, had a great piece of advice and said that no mat­ter what is hap­pen­ing in her busy dai­ly life, she “does some­thing every sin­gle day that helps her busi­ness grow”. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she admit­ted that that “one thing” usu­al­ly snow­balls into two or three, thus cre­at­ing a pro­duc­tive envi­ron­ment that makes her feel accom­plished and bet­ters her busi­ness simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Car­ol also explained that over the course of her career she has dis­cov­ered that in order to tru­ly dis­con­nect and be present with her friends and fam­i­ly, she needs to phys­i­cal­ly turn off her phone at a cer­tain hour and tell her­self that enough is enough. Her clients and work-relat­ed phone calls will still be there tomor­row and mak­ing the time to unwind and enjoy her home and fam­i­ly is essen­tial in retain­ing the bal­ance she has strived to achieve.

What Works for Me

San­dra Racz, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of The Dec­o­rat­ing and Stag­ing Acad­e­my and own­er of Sig­na­ture Redesign, LLC had a few oth­er tips to share. She shared a unique hack she does a cou­ple times a year that blends fun and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty per­fect­ly. San­dra explained that she lit­er­al­ly sits on the floor with all the mag­a­zines that she has not had time to read. Then, she explains, “I make two sep­a­rate piles, the first is com­piled with mag­a­zines that are ‘just for fun’ and the oth­er con­tains mate­r­i­al with cre­ative ideas that I would love to use in jazz­ing up a client’s home”. What starts off as a fun, rainy day activ­i­ty, dou­bles as a pro­duc­tive exercise.

Calming Colors

As pro­fes­sion­als in the dec­o­rat­ing and stag­ing indus­try, we spend our fair share of time craft­ing stag­ing assess­ments, research­ing new designs and man­ag­ing our social media accounts from our office. So why not have a place where you feel you can be pro­duc­tive yet com­fort­able. A quick trick is to paint the walls of your work­space or any area where you tend to spend a lot of time, a tran­quil and relax­ing paint col­or. For­tu­nate­ly for us all, there is sci­ence behind these paint col­ors and they tru­ly will trig­ger relax­ing bod­i­ly reac­tions. Our per­son­al favorites are Qui­etude Sher­win-Williams 6212, Ston­ing­ton Gray HC-170 and Sky­light 205 Far­row & Ball. 

Spruce up your Space

If you want to fur­ther this office revamp even more, go paper­less! We have found that it is SO much eas­i­er to find impor­tant docs from pri­or clients or just about any­thing when it is search­able in a com­put­er fold­er, rather than filed away. It is 2018 peo­ple and there are brilliant/inexpensive scan­ners avail­able. So uti­lize them! You will save your­self space and headaches.

 

We are just scratch­ing the sur­face with this stuff, but hope­ful­ly these tid­bits of infor­ma­tion will be enough to get you start­ed. Stay tuned for more advice, hacks and all things dec­o­rat­ing and stag­ing from the ladies who tru­ly know best!