Hey, Reader!
About a month ago, my high schoolers went back to school. I was ready for it. My coffee was hot and my studio was quiet for the first time since June. But in that peace and quiet my brain glitched.
It did the thing where I couldn't focus. It was like my mind decided I had unlimited time between now and Christmas.
I do not.
Look, a lot of us need a breather between Back to School and holiday chaos. Nothing wrong with that.
But that 'breather' can lead to extended leave and that leads to 2am sprints to deliver on a deadline and before you know it, you're exhausted and behind on everything. And if your life works anything like mine, that’s when a client email will show up in your inbox asking if you can do a “quick and easy” job for them.
This Eduletter is about taking control with a realistic look at your calendar and commitments between now and New Year’s Day. Things don't have to get out of hand this season. Wouldn’t it be amazing to go into the holidays fresh? Or, if that bar is too high, let’s shoot for “less frazzled than last year.”
Oh and I threw in a bonus mini-tip about adding an anti-AI clause to your contracts.
Before we dig in, check out these designs.
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LAMBE LANE DESIGNS - COTSWOLD GARDEN COLLECTION
Quiet Garden Tones
Muted lavender, parchment, and olive give this collection a beautifully timeless feel. The palette is soft and romantic and evokes images of an English garden at twilight.
A Thoughtful Mix of Scale
This collection is masterful. Delicate floral sprigs and densely scattered blossoms are balanced by subtle geometric grids and stripes. This combination gives the collection versatility while still keeping it cohesive.
Made for a Timeless Home
These patterns could easily be used to pull an entire room together. From curtains to wallpaper to throw pillows and beyond. It's well suited to buyers who love English-country interiors, vintage textiles and understated cottage style.
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DANELYS SIDRON - LUNARIA VINE in IRON SLATE
Golden Blooms After Dark
I had a hard time choosing the color version I liked best. It was between this one and the merlot. What sold me on this one - I'm a sucker for sage and the way the florals almost glow against the charcoal background. The palette is vintage-drama, giving moody sophistication.
A Garden That Wanders
Alive with movement, long, meandering stems lead the eye through clusters of loosely drawn flowers and leaves. The open arrangement feels organic and slightly untamed.
Cottage Style With a Moody Side
This pattern would look amazing on wallpaper, drapery, bedding or an upholstered accent chair. It’s an appealing choice for someone who loves folk florals and cottage-inspired design but prefers deeper, more dramatic colors.
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AMY LIZZI ART
Mustard With Bite
Okay. I love the visual play here. She pulled-off bold and hidden in the same design. The colors and patterns work together to do make that happen. Black and creamy white create striking contrast. The rich mustard background gives this limited palette warmth and confidence.
Curves, Stripes and a Little Hypnosis
The coiled snakes fit together like chunky puzzle pieces, while their uneven stripes create movement. Repeated diamond-shaped markings add a strong graphic focal point among all those winding lines.
For the Bold and Wild-at-Heart
This is fantastic in modern home decor as statement wallpaper, curtains, or oversized throw pillows. I can see it on notebooks or even on playful apparel. It’s ideal for someone who loves mid-century design, unconventional animal motifs and interiors with big personality.
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Tip #1: Count your hours. Literally.
September does a funny thing to us. The kids are back in a routine, the inbox wakes up, you feel energized - like you’re going to have tons of free time now that the kids are back in school. Maybe you take on four new projects on the strength of that feeling. I mean, pumpkin spice season seems endless, doesn’t it?
The thing is, it’s not.
Fall is about 14 weeks long. And if you’re an American, it has a holiday sitting smack-dab in the middle. (And if you have kids, you also have to contend with Halloween.)
So, how much time do you really have for work?
Don’t guess.
Open your master calendar. Winter’s official start is December 21. Work backwards from there. Mark the school events, kids’ sports stuff, travel, birthdays. Then block off two weeks (or more!) around Christmas. Time will evaporate then, especially if kids are home on break.
Next, mark blocks of time you are dedicating to your work. Leave the blocks empty for now. We'll fill them in soon. Just mark off blocks of time for now. Make sure you're blocking time when you'll actually work. Not the aspirational 6am ones you have never done.
Add them up. That number is your work-hour inventory for the rest of the year.
Two Things: 1. Don't schedule your entire day, every day. You've got to leave cushion for fun stuff and sick days. 2. Don’t panic if your work-hour inventory is smaller than you thought it would be. It usually is. That’s why we're doing this now. Hang in there. We're going to make all of this work.
Pro Tip: Use a paper calendar and keep it where you work. It’s harder to ignore than a screen you can minimize. |
Okay. Now it's time to fill in those blocks of time. Work from your most important project, soonest deadline, to least. Is there a collection to finish? A client deadline? Customer email follow-up? Metadata update? Courses you signed up for?
Be realistic about how much time things will take. If you have more on your "to do list" than hours available, now is the time to make adjustments. You can add more work hours here and there if you need to.
Adding an hour after the kids are in bed or on a Saturday morning, is a lot better than pulling an all-nighter in December.
You can even move projects/ tasks into January if they have flexible deadlines.
When you do things this way ahead of time, you're working on your terms. You can make rational decisions. You can plan without the panic. Which gives you more time for pumpkin spice runs.
If you're struggling to do this, no shade. I've got you. Think about scheduling a one-on-one Art Biz Audit with me. We can work together to figure out what you need to do to make your business life run more smoothly.
Tip #2: How to deal with new projects
Once you’ve got your projects blocked and things are humming along, something will happen. Something unplanned. Maybe you'll get an email request for a client project. Probably from a nice person. Asking for time that is already spoken for.
You’ll tell yourself that it’s just a little thing. You can squeeze it in. But you know as well as I do that odds are, if you take that job, you’re going to be Grumpy the Overcommitted Designer. Those 2am work sessions are no fun and they’re the absolute worst when you’ve got a Halloween costume to finish or presents to wrap.
So, don’t do it.
Resist the impulse to overcommit.
Trust me. I’ve been there. More than once.
But Mandy, that’s real money I’d be turning down.
Not necessarily.
Let’s say that the project would take you about six hours from start to finish. But because you've planned your work-hour inventory ahead of time, you know you only have three spare work hours.
Now you're not working off assumptions and feelings. You've got math. And you can see the math doesn’t work.
You know what does work? A counter-offer. A request for a date adjustment or deferral. Pros do it all the time.
How? Keep reading…
Send an email response suggesting a date adjustment or deferral. Make sure it has:
- Warmth with a genuine yes. Tell them you want the project, and you are glad they thought of you.
- A specific date. “I can start January 12” is more professional than a vague “early next year.”
- One thing they can do today. Giving them something to do (like send you a brief) sets the stage for the work to get done and gives the email sender confidence you’re not blowing them off.
Keep the email short and respond ASAP - best is the same day you got it.
For some reason, a lot of us tend to treat the time between December 31 and January 1 as a cliff. It’s like New Year’s Eve is this pinnacle of the year and New Year’s Day is a trough. (Maybe that’s from too many past hangovers.) I don’t know what it is. But if you’re not treating January 2027 as a continuation of your work schedule, you’re missing out.
The designers I know who look calm in November are not faster than you. They just made a plan in September and stuck to it.
BONUS Mini-Tip: Prohibition on AI Training and Style Replication
I got a great idea from Geraldine after last weeks email on pricing. Consider adding an anti-AI clause to your contracts. You can find lots of versions online. This is one I had Claude help me write.
Keep in mind, this is contract language, not legal advice. Have an attorney review before use.
Licensor reserves all rights not expressly granted. Licensee shall not, and shall not authorize, permit, sublicense, or assist any third party to:
(a) use the Licensed Work, any portion of it, any derivative, or any associated metadata, as training data, input, fine-tuning material, evaluation data, embedding source, or dataset content for any artificial intelligence system, machine learning model, neural network, LoRA, or generative tool, now existing or later developed;
(b) scrape, mine, upload, or ingest the Licensed Work into any database, model, or service designed to generate or simulate images, styles, compositions, or likenesses; or
(c) use Licensor’s name, signature, or the style of the Licensed Work as a prompt, tag, or identifier to generate synthetic works.
Any such use requires Licensor’s prior written license and a separately negotiated fee. Licensee shall impose these restrictions on all sublicensees and downstream users. This clause survives expiration or termination of the license.
This is worthwhile to consider putting a clause like this into your contracts. And it's an important conversation to have with clients.
Guard your design time. Set up Focus on your iPad.
Your iPad is your studio and also the thing pinging you about Anthropologie sales. Focus fixes that so you can work distraction-free.
- Go to Settings > Focus and set up a Custom Focus.
- Choose which people and apps can still reach you.
- Add app filters under Focus Filters. You can control what an app shows you when the Focus is on, like which mail account or which calendar appears.
- Schedule it so it turns itself on, and turn on Share Across Devices to use the same Focus no matter which Apple device you're using.
My setup: My work Focus is named Studio. Messages from the humans who live in my house get through. Everything else waits. Studio is scheduled for the blocks in Tip 1.
Focus is a solid help, but you’ll still need self-control. Silencing notifications does not stop you from opening YouTube “for research” or Instagram “to check one thing.”
Unfortunately, my dog and cat are still unfiltered. Cheeseball and Peanut don’t respect Apple’s ecosystem.
Until next week - keep creating! 🎨
P.S. — If your count left more gaps than commitments, the free Pattern Collection Playbook is a good place to start filling them.
