A Second Quarter Work Cadences Check In

It's nearing the end of June so I thought I would do a work cadences check-in. Earlier, I posted about How to Maintain Your Cadences When Work is Lit and shared some of the adjustments I'm making to ensure my work continues to be sustainable even though it's busy.

And well, I wanted to give you some updates.

Here are the key areas I was adjusting to support my overall wellbeing while I continue to rebuild my business:

• adjust my social media strategy to something I can maintain consistently
• have weekly tech free days
• build better business systems
• attend weekly social outings that aren't work related.

In this post, I'm going to give you an update on how each of these things is going and share what I've learned

Dialing Back Social Media

This one has been harder than I thought. Once you start to attract attention on social media, it can get kind of addicting, which I shared a little bit about in Rewiring my Relationship to Dopamine.

It feels like you're starting to build momentum and get people to pay attention to your work. And while attention is critical for your business, the point of social media is also to move people along on their customer journey.

So while I dialed back my social media in some ways, I amped it up in others. I did less posting on Threads and more posting on Linkedin and I even did 3 days in a row of going Live on Instagram to test out engagement on that platform because it's been confusing me lately.

Here's what I learned over the past month:

• Social media is still exhausting and time consuming, which is not good for my work cadences.
• I prefer to spend my time putting together long form content that fully fleshes out an issue I know is important to people and repurposing it in multiple ways. I'm currently training myself to do this by writing a long blog post first and then, where appropriate, turning that post into one or two Youtube videos and potentially a couple of longer Linkedin posts.
• Social media is important, but it's only one piece of the customer journey. Spending all my time on this piece, but not creating in depth content for my website is a fast way to break trust with my potential customers and lose potential leads so dialing back on social media and dialing up on my blog is the right move.
• Overall, the customer journey for my business is currently half-baked. I'm getting attention and maybe even keeping it, but I'm not converting attention to trust or converting that trust to money. That means social media isn't my problem.

Giving myself space to dial back really helped me take a bird's eye view of my business's content ecosystem and see where I've been falling short. I'm so glad I trusted my instincts to dial things down and give myself some breathing room and energy to give attention to what is definitely a glaring problem. Now I've got a great summer project to focus on, followed by a fall project, followed by a winter one, lol.

Weekly Tech Free Days to Reset My Work Cadences

Candidly, this did not happen. But what has been happening is more time where I turn my phone off for hours at a time or turn it off early for the night around 8 or 9pm. Creating gaps in my day where I'm screen free or not on my phone has been great. And since I do most of my content creation inside the Obsidian app, I can also go to cafes that don't have Wifi and work uninterrupted without the Internet to distract me. In those situations, I sometimes turn off my phone or leave it in my car.

Because I feel called to work more often on different days, it's getting increasingly hard for me to fully check out so the dedicated times with my phone off or without access to my phone have felt more manageable then a full tech free day.

From a work cadences perspective, it's been much easier for me to commit to taking full days off of work. I took a full day off on Thursday for Juneteenth and another on Saturday to give my mind and body time to rest and process. Giving my brain a full break from work for at least 2 full days a week and sometimes 3 has been extremely rejuvenating and it helps me maintain my creativity and more clearly direct and prioritize my energy towards the most important projects.

Now that Mars has moved into Virgo in my 12th house, I'm really feeling called to pull back my energy for the summer. So an adjustment I'm making is to swap my tech free days for spending more time communing in nature. The flower garden always needs tending and our vegetable pots also need to be regularly pruned, watered, and talked to. So this summer, I'll commit to spending a couple of early mornings a week with plants and also try to swing a some time near the ocean, as that's always so healing to me.

I think that will be more nurturing and supportive to me this summer and it will also naturally get me some time away from screens.

Build Better Business Systems

The funny thing about having better systems is that I'm never going to be the one to build them. That means I have to hire help for this, which means I need to have money to hire help. This is admittedly a bit of a circle for me at the moment.

One of the things I started to do was physically write out workflows for different aspects of my business. One is for my primary offer lowercase legal that teaches folks in corporate contracting how to negotiate higher paying contracts. I have a sequence of modules I take people through in that membership that teaches them the bare minimum legal they need to know to land better clients and higher paying contracts. It includes how I want to onboard folks once they buy and how I want them to work through the modules.

Another workflow I'm starting to write out is a content creation workflow. The first step I've taken is mapping out all the different ways I create content and all the different places I produce content. This in itself has been a big project and I'm looking forward to having someone create a robust content database for me one day that automatically updates itself. The other piece of this project has been clearly identifying what the different types of content are doing -- who the content is for, what part of the customer journey it speaks to, and how it's moving people along in that journey.

That process has helped me see some opportunities for simple automations that could save me time, like automatically uploading transcripts from sales calls, workshops, and 1:1 sessions to Claude and have it automatically generate on-message content ideas for me.

There are other automations like turning a blog post into long-form social media content that are possible as well.

My next step is to make a list of the different automations I know of with links to the directions for how to build them for different aspects of my content system. I may not be able to build a whole database, but I can certainly do small things that save me time, generally make content creation easier, and improve my overall work cadences.

Non-Work Related Social Outings

Not going to lie, this one has been the MOST fun for me lately. There is a pretty big black community in Baltimore and there are lots of book nerds among them. I went to another Pages in the Park event to read in the park with a bunch of folks and exchange books. I picked up the book "The Ethical Slut," which I've been meaning to read for a while and dove right in.

I also attended a free zinemaking workshop with a local artist that I absolutely loved and have been making little zines a few times a week to process big feelings in this very fucked up world we live in. It's been very therapeutic. I'm also thinking about making zines to announce local pay-what-you-can legal office hours for artists in the city!

Lastly, I joined a book club! We are reading the book Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell and I am so excited to discuss it with folks this week at a local wine bar. I'm also in the process of making dates with friends to go to free yoga and salsa classes in the park and get in a couple of free 1:1 reformer sessions while my friends are still getting their pilates instructor certifications.

This one has been great for me because it's getting me outside and I'm learning how to socialize again, which takes lots of practice for a natural introvert.

The practice of getting outside is also helping my business. When I meet people who I think could be good business connections, whether online or in real life, I've been a lot more proactive about introducing myself and making time to meet in-person or virtually and I love that for me.

What the Summer Holds for My Work Cadences

Summer is feeling like a crucial time for me both personally and professionally. Personally, I just feel like I need to pull back my energy a bit. That doesn't mean isolate, but it does mean be intentional about who I'm engaging with and how I'm engaging with them.

Professionally, I have some major kinks to work out in my business, but the two I'm focused on this summer are ensuring my offer delivers on its promise (that means the promise is clear and the substance of the offer makes it easy to achieve) and building out the blog on my website. Those two things will put me in a good position to do some more hard core marketing in August and September to start generating consistent sales in my business. I also think that for ADHD purposes and my overall work cadences, it will help me to have a clear focus for the summer months because I usually struggle to do anything during these months.

I'm looking forward to using that Mars in Virgo energy to put on my "here's how to fix it hat" to tinker the things that aren't working until they shine.

I am admittedly also looking forward to summer naps and I am definitely trying to figure out how to spend a week in Maine in September and several weeks in Ireland starting in the middle of July.

Let's see what happens.