Time Management - Keeping up with Future ideas and projects

The most wonderful time of year is approaching! Rather quickly I must say!


This is the time of year when long hours of caffeine induced work sessions are upon handcrafters and artists. We are busy making things and filling orders while trying to maintaining home lives and get some sleep once in a while. However, for some of us this can also be a time of great inspiration. When those creative juices are flowing we can come up with copious amounts of new ideas and projects we would like to do in the future.

It is good practice to have a notebook or a place on your calendar to keep up with these free flowing ideas so that they don't get lost in your brain once the holidays are over.

If you keep a notebook, try to have a notebook specifically for ideas and future projects. When you jot down ideas in a notebook that also serves daily to do lists, orders, and notes the ideas get lost amongst the pages and it may take a long time to find them. Having a designated book for ideas and future projects can be good to reference when you are feeling uninspired. Try to make a list of materials needed for each idea also, so that when you are short on cash for new supplies, you can quickly see what projects you can complete with the materials you have on hand. Also, if the idea is holiday specific make notes of what time of year the project needs to be started and listed for sale so that you have some sort of plan for getting that idea off of paper and into salable form.

If you prefer to keep them on a calendar of sorts look for a generic calendar or even an outdated calendar that you can use for this specific purpose. The calendar may not be useful to figure out what day it is, but months are not going to change anytime soon and it can help to schedule out when to start projects and when to introduce new products to your customers.

I personally prefer the calendar method over the notebook method simply because I can go ahead and organize my ideas when they pop into my head with out worrying about pages in a notebook. I can also see months where I don't have new things scheduled and arrange things so that I am working on new ideas throughout the year.

It can also be helpful to remember that just because snowmen aren't prominent in August, you may choose to work on them then because you have an unrealistic amount of projects scheduled for other months already.