You know that interior design is a competitive, high-energy industry. Interior designers may work long hours, and many find that maintaining a work-life balance is a challenge.
With everything from accounting to difficult clients putting forth unreasonable demands to simply keeping good notes, there is a lot for an interior designer to contend with.
How best to combat all that stress? Here are a few great tips interior designers can follow to minimize their stress levels.
5. Take Time for You
Perhaps the most cliché and yet most-difficult-to-achieve advice is to ensure that you make adequate time for you. Whether this means taking a 15-minute coffee break or ensuring you set aside time in the evening or on weekends, this is crucial to stress management, not just for interior designers but for everyone.
While it may seem very difficult to achieve, following some of the other tips here can help you work toward creating better work-life balance.
4. Make Time for the Little Tasks
Small tasks, such as entering expenses, may be the best candidates for being brushed aside at the end of a busy day, week, or month. Continually setting aside small tasks, however, can make for a big headache later.
Instead of allowing these seemingly insignificant tasks to pile up on your desk, take 5–10 minutes each day to ensure that they are done. You will find that you likely go into each day better organized—and these “small tasks” cannot later become big ones that take up inordinate amounts of time.
3. Stop Multitasking
Studies have proven that multitasking is actually detrimental to your ability to complete a task. Your divided attention makes it difficult to focus on completing any task you are working on, which means it takes longer to complete each task!
While multitasking may make you feel like you are being more productive, chances are you will accomplish more if you set aside time to complete one task at a time. You can achieve this by effectively prioritizing and categorizing tasks by both their urgency and the amount of time they will take you to complete.
By giving each task your full and undivided attention, you will accomplish things more swiftly.
2. Get Organized
Organization is key to reducing stress. Having a plan to tackle tasks, such as arranging them by the amount of time needed, is one system of organization. So is effectively planning your day; if you have a meeting in one area of town and you know you’ll need to meet vendors in that same district, plan to accomplish everything in one trip, rather than two or three.
Organization also means keeping good notes, tracking receipts, and keeping your workspace neat and tidy. All of these steps contribute to your ability to access information quickly and easily. Disorganization can easily make you feel overwhelmed, especially when you are short on time.
1. Get the Right Help
You may not be able to afford an assistant, but you can likely afford interior design business software, which can help you streamline your workflows, work in a more efficient manner, integrate your processes, and improve your accounting.
This software solution allows you to work on projects from end to end, minimizing the number of times you need to enter data, and allowing you to quickly and easily perform tasks such as generating invoices and purchase orders.
Mobile capabilities also help keep you organized on the go. Better accounting and information can help increase insights into your business and also allows you better tracking of accounts receivable and unpaid invoices—which can help manage cash flows. All of that goes a long way to helping interior designers work smarter and reduce stress!
