If you want to get rid of a bad habit,
he says, remove the cue. If you tend to
get sucked into checking social media
or email, for example, turn off your
phone or put it in another room.
ONE GOOD HABIT...
One of the easiest ways to fine-tune
your morning ritual is what he calls
“habit stacking.” Take something
you do every morning and stack
another habit on top of it. For me, it
starts with coffee. While the espresso
is brewing, I tidy up. When it’s
done, I turn off whatever I’m doing
— reading the newspaper online
usually — and open my to-do list.
If all goes well, one good habit
leads to another.
For some people, building produc-
tive habits is second nature. Kristen
Baird is one of those. She built a
thriving jewelry business with two full-
time assistants before she turned 30.
Two years after opening her business
in 2015, she won the Halstead Grant
and was chosen as one of Savannah’s
“Rising Stars of Business.”
When we caught up over the
summer, she was expecting her
first child. But instead of reining in
expectations for her business, she
was getting super-efficient, setting up
a system that could almost work on
autopilot.
Kristen hadn’t heard of Atomic
Habits, but when I described the idea
of morning rituals and habit stacking,
she got excited. It turns out, she was
already applying the techniques
James Clear laid out in his book.
Basic premise of Clear’s theory is
that success is the product of small
daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime
transformations. “You should be far
more concerned with your current
trajectory than with your current
results,” he writes. “Goals are about
the results you want to achieve.
Systems are about the processes that
lead to those results.
“If you want to predict where you’ll
end up in life, all you have to do is
follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny
losses and see how your daily choices
will compound ten or twenty years
down the line.”
Kristen’s morning routine begins
with breakfast, something she was in
the habit of skipping before her preg-
nancy. She makes a smoothie after
getting up. “Then I sit down and start
‘stacking,’ as you put it,” she says.
KEEP UP
First, she gives her email a quick
check. “Anything I can delete,
I delete. Anything that needs a
response, I mark so I can deal with it
later in the day.”
Then she opens her Google calendar
in another tab, checks to see what’s
going on today. In a third tab, she
opens Xero, the app she uses for
bookkeeping. “Every single morning,
I upload receipts from the day before,
reconcile any transactions, and make
sure invoices have been added for
anything that’s happened overnight.”
Daily bookkeeping has made a huge
difference for her. “I used to hate tax
season because I’d wait until the last
minute, then have weeks of misery,”
she says. Then she figured out that
by spending about five minutes every
morning, she could get everything
done as she went along. “At tax
season, I literally have nothing to do.”
She uses MileIQ to track business-
related miles on her car. “I log any
kind of driving I’ve done, whether
business or personal, while it’s fresh
in my mind. If you wait until the end
of the year to classify your drives, it’s
a pain. I usually do mine every other
day, which is so much easier.”
Finally, she opens the Google doc
she uses to track everything going
on in her jewelry business. Under
subheads such as “In Production”
and “Active but Not Yet in Produc-
tion,” she lists ongoing projects — an
heirloom update for one client, a
CAD design for another — noting (in
red) whether or not it’s been billed
and paid or a client needs to sign a
contract. Under “Potential Clients,”
another string of to-do’s appears.By 9 a.m. every morning, Kristen
has had breakfast, updated her ac-
counting, and checked her calendar to
make sure appointments for the day
are on her phone. “I’m super forgetful
right now — pregnancy brain! — so I
set three reminders for any appoint-
ment. That way, if I have something
coming up, alarms start going off an
9, 9:15, 9:30, etc.”
When her virtual assistant logs,
she can look at the client list and see
where everything stands. Meanwhile,
Kristen hits the studio for a few hours
of total focus. After lunch, she starts
to lose steam so spends time on
the computer instead. “I can still get
things done but I’m not physically
exhausting myself,” she says.
Her weekend ritual varies a little,
but even here she takes advantage of
habit stacking — and multi-tasking.
On Sundays, she goes for a run with
her running club. On the way home,
she and her husband stop at the
co-op gallery where she sells her
jewelry. It’s closed then so she can let
herself in and tend to her cases with
no interruptions.
“After a busy week, I need to
remerchandise my stuff and fix up the
displays,” she says. “My husband waits
in the car while I run in for 10 minutes
or so. Doing that trip on its own
would mean a 20-minute drive to and
from the gallery, finding parking, and
walking. It would take up to an hour
and a half of my day.
“I find that you either have a good
routine or a flustered, chaotic one,”
Kristen says. “I feel like mine is getting
better.”
CATHLEEN MCCARTHY jewelry and business for has covered Town & Country,
JCK, The Washington Post, and her own
site, TheJewelryLoupe.com.NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 11find more online
“5 Apps for a Successful
Jewelry Business”
http://www.interweave.com/category/
article/jewelry