My Etsy shop now has 101 people favoriting it! Woohoo! I also now have 60 items listed–it’s been a long and frustrating haul, trying to exceed demand a bit and supply enough so that people have a good selection of my items to look through. I’m still working hard on it, and finding the right balance.
The most confounding part is figuring out how to divide my time, in a given day or week. When do I work with raw clay? When do I work on glazing stuff that’s already bisqued? How much stuff, greenware or glazeware, do I hoard before I fire a load of it? When should I take photos? How much time should I spend listing items/editing photos/writing up promo material/blogging/researching, etc. etc?
I suppose I’m a little more prepared for this kind of time management than most people my age would be. I went to an independent study high school, where I met with my teachers once a week, was given about a week’s worth of work each time with no hard-and-fast due date…and it was up to me to get a semester’s worth of work done, by the end of the semester. So I guess I just learned a good set of skills while I was there.
But–there are no deadlines at all now, and there’s no one really accountable for my time except me. It’s something I have to continually manage and think about and organize as best I can. It’s very frustrating sometimes, because when people find out I work for myself they seem to think I have huge amounts of free time and can do whatever I want. To a certain extent this is true–I have more of an ability to make time for things, or shift my daily schedule around as I like. But on the other hand…there is something to be said for having a consistant, dependable schedule–it means you can plan around it pretty easily. There is also something to be said for not taking your work home with you. Which I obviously can’t do, because my work is my home. So there’s pros and cons to both, and I suppose that’s why not everyone is a small business owner and/or works from home.
