Knock knock.
Who’s there?
How do you stay sane mid-season?
You don’t.
But you can, so I want to share some tips with you that I use to try and keep at least a fingertip grip on my sanity mid-season. Because I’ll be honest with you that’s all it ever is at this time of year.
I told you a few weeks ago that I had let my culling slip and as a result my whole workflow fell apart.
As soon as I got back on track with my culling, everything else fell back into place and I’m back to having only one edit in the queue now.
If you don’t have a workflow yet, make one.
I don’t do anything fancy, I keep it really simple.
If I have weddings to cull, they’re my first priority above anything and everything else. I cull them fairly loosely in Photomechanic – I don’t mind deleting duplicates and stuff as I go through the edit later in lightroom, I find that quicker than culling more slowly or doing two passes of the cull.
Once a wedding is culled, I zip through it again in Photomechanic and 5-star anything I want to edit for the preview. This is usually 40-60 images.
Then I immediately import the whole wedding into LR, instantly edit those preview images, and send 5-10 of them to the client, and do an instagram story post tagging the suppliers.
This is a solid example of habit stacking. In workflow terms, habit stacking is taking a bunch of individual tasks and lumping them together into one multi-stage task so that you get into the habit of doing those tasks back to back. Personally I think it’s workflow gold. In this example it’s cull + edit preview + deliver preview + online backup because I know once I’ve done the cull I’m able to move the selected files onto a drive that is part of my online automated backup (I use Backblaze).
Did you know:
1) You don’t have to send previews to your clients if that is stressful for you
2) You don’t have to edit within a certain number of weeks just because you’re led to believe that’s the industry standard if that is stressful for you
3) You don’t have to do slideshows if that is stressful for you
I got in the habit of leaving weddings and saying “I’ll send you some previews in a day or two” and putting unnecessary pressure on myself because once I’d said it I felt I had to follow through with it.
I’ve stopped that now. If my workflow is working efficiently as I’ve described it above, then yeah they get their (surprise) previews. But I want that to be my choice.
I’ve never set an expectation for how long it’ll take to get their photos. For me, on average it takes me 3-4 weeks to deliver a full wedding but I know for a fact clients would be happy to wait longer as long as they know, but the key is always early and open communication.
Don’t wait for clients to start chasing you for their images if you know you’re falling behind. Tell them early. If they know, they really won’t mind.
Don’t stick your head in the sand, just talk to your clients. Drop them an email letting them know you’re super busy with work and life, and that you’re hoping to have their images with them by a certain date, and that if anything changes with that you’ll let them know. You’ll be amazed how much better you’ll feel when you do this.
BUT. Beware Parkinson’s law!
Parkinsons Law is the reason we leave stuff to the last minute. Basically it’s a psychological phenomena that says you’ll take as long as you’re given for any task. So if you start giving yourself say 12 weeks to edit a wedding, chances are you’ll still be panicking trying to hit that 12 week deadline and doing everything at the last minute. You’ll wonder how it’s still happening even though you’ve given yourself several extra weeks.
If that sounds like you, then realistically you probably just need a better workflow and a stronger work ethic, because even if you gave yourself 100 weeks you’d probably still find you were getting everything done at the last minute.
It’s so easy when you’re in the ‘shoot-edit-sleep-repeat’ cycle that you might look ahead in your calendar, see a gap between weddings, and think ok I’ll just get all my culling/editing done then.
Mistake.
It is my very humble opinion that you should work as hard as possible when you’re busy so that your breaks become real breaks, otherwise major burnout can and will occur.
I’m currently in a two week break between weddings. I knew it was coming and I worked ultra, ultra hard the last two or three weeks to make sure all my culling and editing was done so that I could have a proper break from work without feeling like anything needed urgent attention.
I could’ve taken my foot off the editing gas the last few weeks knowing I had these two ‘free’ weeks where I could sit in my office and edit, but I’ve learned from that mistake in the past.
There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’ve had a break but arriving at that next wedding just as frazzled as when you finished the last one.
So I strongly recommend you work hard FOR your breaks so you don’t have to work hard IN your breaks.
Don’t spend energy mid-season on things that can wait til off-season.
Your website/branding etc can wait til the winter.
Mid-season workshops do more harm than good in my opinion.
If another photographer triggers you on insta/fb – mute or unfollow.
Buy new equipment and learn how to use it in off-season.
Stick to what you know when you’re busy.
Focus on enjoyment and gratitude when shooting.
Know that mid-summer is always slower for enquiries/bookings.
Ask for help if you need it.
Ask for help if you need it.
Ask for help if you need it.
Thanks for reading!
Adam
PS – I do have a 10 minute podcast episode about Parkinson’s Law if you fancy a listen: https://thepositivecreatives.com/episode/parkinsons-law-procrastination-and-deadlines-in-creativity/
