11 ways to get your life together in 2026 (systems for creatives)

Transcript

All right, welcome back. Today, this is a video I am doing by request, and it is about creative systems, putting docs together, organizing your life and your workflows. Essentially, 11 ways to get your life together in 2026. I just got off the road for tour. We had 50 brands come to Toronto, Miami, and both New York days, each day where I was coaching brands on exercises for their year, for organizing their content, for organizing their marketing funnels. So I'm going to get a whole video on doing things like this to organize your brand live from one of those dates that you'll see soon. But on this, I want to concentrate on what are the things that can have the most efficacy to get you systematized, organized, and making the most impact on your creative work, whether that is being an artist, a designer, owning your own brand, a writer, and even just working in a creative field at a job. So we're going to cover building a reference repository, managing your ideas lists, getting a content calendar together, folders and workflows for content creators, capturing stuff on your phone, doing a weekly update for your bosses, having a team tracker together if you have a small agency or group working together, putting together process docs, planning and putting together your content, managing emails out to leads. This is the kind of stuff that you really need inside your creative life, but there's no way to learn it if you're not really in the job and have really organized people around you. I'm super excited to share it with y'all. Let's lock in. So for the majority of these, I'm just going to show you my workflow so you can see an actual example of what goes on there. First, I'm going to start with a reference list. If you've watched some of my older videos, you may have seen this before. I'll show it to you in action. This is one of the most important things that any creative person can do that will really genuinely help you get your life together over the long term. So, for instance, this is a Notion doc that I have that has a bunch of references I can pull from for the creative work I do. As many of you know, I do creative strategy for brands, which is art direction and creative direction work where I am working on briefs and ideation for specific campaigns. And I have a large amount of things, bookmarks, etc., like everyone does, I need to be able to bring into that work. And this could be certain specific writing styles, essay styles, if you're a writer. This could be techniques or things that you'd like or want to try as a designer. You need a way to organize them. I use Notion for this, and I really like Notion for it. It could also just be a spreadsheet. But really, this has the name of the asset, has a type. So, for instance, for me, this is a content tracker for me. I have content for events, content for emails, content for carousels, content for launches, or content that's product-specific. I have a separate one of this for personal brand. We have different expert stuff. There's a link to the actual asset, and I have a status. Is this a reference, or have I used it? And if we used it, was it a winner? Some notes around it there. That is pretty thorough. You don't need to be this thorough. What I would recommend is you have a name for it. You have all of your types added. Again, you can just click and add a type. You'll see I have a hell of types in here, and then a link to it there. You don't necessarily need to track whether you've used it or it's a winner or a reference, whatever. But it's important to think, okay, I am going to be doing creative work for a long time. Every time I do it, I'm going and gathering references or trying to find that one link. As soon as you start building this library and adding regularly to it, all of a sudden that time goes so much faster. And then whenever you're applying for a job or you're showing people why you should work on a campaign and you pull up and, oh, here's my master matrix. Let's pull up all my event examples. Let's walk through how we could use this. You are coming across in a way that most other creatives aren't and setting yourself apart. So, how to put this together. First, choose your weapon of choice. You can do a spreadsheet. I do a lot in Notion. As you can see here, we have a hell of stuff inside here. So it makes sense for me to do that. Create a table and set a time regularly to add to it. I do this every Sunday night. I would get a time on your calendar where your job specifically is to take your bookmarks from your web browser, X, Instagram, TikTok, see if any of that's relevant, label it, and put it in here. So the other half of this, you have to actively be doing that bookmarking and that finding when you scroll and find things, which I think a lot of people actually end up really enjoying because they feel more value and start to be more intentional about their time online when they have a system like this, which ties really quickly into an ideas list. So if you're a content creator or you're doing work or putting out work regularly, I recommend just having a big doc for ideas. If you have no other organization, just getting a massive doc. So this is basically what I have for this. This is an older version. I've moved this now as one I'm willing to share, where I basically just have bullet lists of things I like. So these are all carousel ideas I have, all one-shot ideas I have, ideas of things I was doing in Paris. I'm just basically putting out anything that might be a good video idea inside this doc. But importantly, it has a calendar on top of it. And in Notion, you can go from calendar view or an item view. In item view, I can basically go and have the same kind of table format. What was the name of the item? What date did I want to publish it? Is it a video? Is it an ad? What's the status? Edit, record. Who's the editor? This is how I used to manage all my content. We do this in Asana now, which we'll get to in a bit. But that combination of list and calendar takes you from no organization to some organization. There's way more robust stuff there. But if you are struggling to put your ideas in one place, then you can assign your ideas to a place on the calendar. And again, if you want to put this together, you would open up a new doc. You can just add all your text. Then if you have a table, turn that table into a database. And you have all these types of columns underneath a database. You are functioning inside Notion for something like this. Related, people are always asking, how do you capture content? If you're doing vlogs or you want to be organized, you're traveling, what's an effective way to capture content? I want to talk about content folders, just a simple structure you can have on your phone for when you do this. So two ways to do it. First, if you are traveling a lot, setting up an album when you travel. If you're really organized, you can do sub-albums. I tend to do people, places, and things because then it's really easy for me to find. But oftentimes, I'll just do one album for the place. And then the other key workflow hack is to heart or favorite anything that could be a hook, any awesome shot that you have. Hit it with the heart, and then you have easy access to all of those on your phone whenever you need that banger hook shot. But the flow that I have when I'm not traveling, just day to day, is I literally have a folder for me, a folder for people, places, and things. There are four folders on my iPhone, so I know things are easy to find. So whenever I've shot for a day, if I'm just in an Uber or whatever it is, I will organize that footage. So I will say, basically, I will make sure all of the videos that I'm in go in one place because typically that's actually something I'm hunting down for carousels or B-roll for whatever things. I shoot a lot of packaging and stuff and food stuff like that. Put it all in one place. Easy to find. Places is another good one if you're trying to get establishing shots or visuals or facades. Put it all in one place. And then people, if I'm with other people or I'm shooting individuals, all that goes in one place. And if I'm getting videos of any kind, I can easily know if, okay, I can grab more footage of me. Am I trying to find that packaging? I need a quick shot of a China trip. It's all there. That's another one where if your phone is disorganized, you're trying to find footage, you're doing lots of edits, it's a lifesaver. Today's video is in partnership with Xero, who are a perfect fit for what we're talking about. Xero provides accounting, tax calculation, invoices, and payment acceptance. Then in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, they even offer payroll. Built for small businesses, perfect for freelancers establishing shots or visuals or facades. Put it all in one place. And then people, if I'm with other people or I'm shooting individuals, all that goes in one place. And I'm getting videos of any kind. I can easily know if, okay, I can grab more footage of me. Am I trying to find that packaging? I need a quick shot of a China trip. It's all there. That's another one where, if your phone is disorganized, you're trying to find footage, you're doing lots of edits. It's a lifesaver. Today's video is in partnership with Xero, who are a perfect fit for what we're talking about. Xero provides accounting, tax calculation, and invoices, payment acceptance. Then in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, they even offer payroll. Built for small businesses, perfect for freelancers and creative agencies, and helpful to businesses of all kinds. Xero helps you organize all your financial operations from invoices to accounting to tax in one place. If I can recommend one thing if you're building a creative business, it is you want to start with systems you can grow into as your business scales. You don't want to have 10 different platforms for 10 different things. A few of my favorite features are that you can connect and import transactions from your banks, track inventory levels, collaborate with unlimited users, and you have an accounting dashboard for a real-time view of your business performance. Being able to handle invoicing, payroll, and accounting all in one place that you simply use more of as you need it is going to give you a lot of relief. And Xero unlocks that supercharged feeling that, as you grow, you've got an all-in-one platform to help you make complex tasks simple. If you want to stop piecing together your business finances in the new year, you can get 90% off for six months using the link in the description. Thank you so much to Xero for partnering on this video. But getting more tactical, if you have clients or if you work at a job, the weekly update is something I did all through my professional career because a boss asked for it, and I just kept it going, but it will save you so much heartache, especially if you do freelance or client work. So what do I mean by this? At the end of every week, you send out a simple email that says too long, didn't read. Here's two or three highlights of this week. You pull from the below, which is what got accomplished this week. So just a checklist. These are the things that happened. This is what's going to happen next week, what the plan looks like. And then blockers. Anything that's holding you back from achieving a goal or anything that didn't go as expected so that people know, and if there's something that needs to be resolved, it's being escalated. So you've identified it, you've pulled it out, I still haven't received that doc, Jenny still hasn't gotten this or that. So you can very practically call out where things are. So then whatever client you have knows what you've done, knows what their expectation is of you next week, knows if they or their team or anything else is blocking you from getting the things they have done, and can adjust from it. And if you follow this pretty simple structure, you are going to have way less issues with clients, people being mad about this or that, and it doesn't take long. And if you are managing a team, this is a great thing to ask for from them because then you have a view of what everyone is looking at and what everyone's doing and what they're doing next and where they're held up. The blocker section is really important. You are able to compile those things together in terms of what your team did to then present to a client or then present to an executive team, and you're beginning to level all of that up. And this ties in this idea of a team tracker. So this is one of the tracker I have for carousels where it has a process doc up top, has another database down here with a name, who on the team is the designer, what's the status, what's the due date, what's the link for the final. If you are working with multiple people in any freelance scenario, as a team in a small agency or as a team at a company, as a team on a shoot, if all the things that people are supposed to do are tracked in one database, they all have dates and people assigned to them, and they're getting checked off, you can easily look at, you can even auto-generate reports with stuff like Notion AI. It will just give you a summary of this, of what's gotten done, what remains, who's assigned to what. In one of my previous jobs, we managed a pretty big creative team. We had four graphic designers, we had three people on the video team, and it was very asset-based. What asset are you doing for who? There's tons of assets coming in and out. All the people around us were complaining they weren't getting their assets fast enough. When I came in to manage that team, one of the first things I did was put something like this into place where we actually had a form on the front end where people could request assets. The managers of the team would then review those and assign them to individuals, and a date would get added. The person that requested it had visibility on what the date looked like. We did all this in ClickUp, and then you could literally see what the queue looks like, how many were in front of it. We could review how many assets people were getting done each week. Are these requests tedious? Was there already an existing asset that was done? Does one person have more bandwidth than the others if new requests come in? We're logging it all in one place, and importantly, I could go back to the sales team or the product team or people requesting and be like, hey, there's 21 assets done this week, 11 for your team, 7 for your team. We have this many in the queue. Would you like to reprioritize any of these ones remaining? And all of a sudden, everyone feels better about that process. But it starts, again, with just a simple database like this with the people you're working on for some accountability. And that relates to the idea of a process doc. So if you ever want to hire people or have people help you to do stuff, whether that's video editing you want done for you, writing, social media posting, whatever, most people assume, I'm just going to hire this person, they're going to do it all for me. But the more you have process in place, the better off it's going to go to actually bring them into your org. So the simplest way to look at process, because everyone gets a little turned off by that word, is for every single thing that you want someone else to work on, there's a document. In that document there is a loom, just a video screen share, showing what you do. So for instance, how you log into this or the different walking through whatever board you're showing. Just give people video documentation. It doesn't have to be fancy or great-looking. It's really helpful so they can watch in that step-by-step breakdown. You can take that loom, transcribe it, put it into chatGBT, and it'll give you a step-by-step breakdown that you can review. But for anything, even from that carousel example I showed, in those carousels, the first slide is very specific. The core text needs to fit within the square in the middle. I need to have a photo inside each of those. It needs to be readable at the size on the explore page. So having a checklist for that, where people have to say is this in the middle, is orange in the photo, is it readable at a small size on the explore page? Same thing on the back end. We have two variants for each one. One is a menu chat with a comment. One is just a go find whatever deliverable we have in a bios. We have two variants of all those. That's in the doc. We always do two variants. And then we have a figma board of existing assets that we have. And so being able to have a loom and walk through what that looks like, show examples so people can look through it visually. They have a checklist of all those steps. That becomes a process doc. So anytime a new designer comes on, we can add that into it. The last step on there, if you're hiring multiple roles, you begin to add FAQ on the bottom. What comes up every time when you're onboarding? What are the issues we hit? You add it to the process doc. So whenever someone new comes in, you're beginning to have to handle less of those same repetitive questions. So anyone who has scaled an agency, has scaled freelance work, has worked on a lot of shoots, has brought on remote help, has begun to do that kind of process. And it's literally just a folder inside your drive, your air, or inside your notion where you have these for all of the things that people are going to do to help you. They do not take long to set up. It will save you tons of time on the back end. So if your goal this year is I'm going to get help, or I've been trying to have YouTube editors or whoever, and it hasn't worked out, it's usually not the editor. It's usually that you don't have enough When you're onboarding, what are the issues we hit? You add it to the process doc. So whenever someone new comes in, you're beginning to have to handle less of those same repetitive questions. So anyone who has scaled an agency, has scaled freelance work, has worked on a lot of shoots, has brought on remote help, has begun to do that kind of process. And it's literally just a folder inside your drive, your air, or inside your Notion where you have these for all of the things that people are going to do to help you. They do not take long to set up. It will save you tons of time on the back end. So if your goal this year is, I'm going to get help, or I've been trying to have YouTube editors or whoever, and it hasn't worked out, it's usually not the editor. It's usually that you don't have enough process and documentation in place. So this is a key thing to wrap your head around that will really help. And so those have all been really tactical, database-driven stuff. That's not all the ways that you can get your creative life together. One that is still the best use for stuff like this, this best promotional tool for creatives, is signature series for content. So if you're looking at how do I improve my content this year, how do I have a real plan, it's all around what is the most effective thing I've done, how do I serialize it? So for those of you that know me, you know I have this series, product versus brand. I review different products as a signature series that lots of people know me for. I want to shout out David. He's in Cut 30 right now. I was crushing it before he came in in Cut 32. And he has a signature series where brand-building lessons, like behind the brand. And he's done Gentle Monster, he's done beans, but he sits down, he has a very similar style each time, and he walks through in a similar visual way and a similar structural way the stories behind some of these brands and, in particular, their founders. He taps in there. It's a little different than everybody else, but he's found his signature series. You can see him going from talking about all these different things to, oh, I found my thing. And so if you are doing anything this year, it's thinking about, for my signature, whether it's something in my portfolio or it's a content piece I'm making, if I was only to make one thing a week or one thing a month, how can I have that signature, that unique thing to me, and then actually act on it. And then if you are working on social media for yourself or for a brand, et cetera, a content pillar system is the system that I teach all the time when I work with brands on what we teach inside Cut 30. For individuals, instituting a pillar system will get you good. What do I mean by a pillar? If you don't know, a pillar is a concept: talking about food, talking about my portfolio videos, design, whatever, plus one or two formats, carousels, green screen, blogs, videos. Every good creative who's online has three to five pillars at any given time. Same thing with brands. They have three to five types of content. We do carousels documenting our journey. We do product reels that are art directed, whatever it is, they have three to five things. But how you get good at it, how you can make the plunge this year to be excellent, is measure that pillar system. So it's a spreadsheet that actually breaks down the views of each pillar each month, their average views per, the saves, the shares, the reach to new audiences versus old audiences, and the hook rate. I will put my pillars doc down inside the description here so you can see it. If you measure those every month and you look at if it's going up or down, then you decide, are we going to improve our hooks? Are we going to change the production value? Or are we going to double down and swap this video some other way every month to see how you improve it? Don't change anything if it's steady state, or remove it. You just give a decision matrix where every month you choose one of those improvements, you choose to keep it the same, or you choose to put it away and replace it with a new pillar. Within three months of being like, we're going to change hooks, we're going to evaluate the entire next month, your social media will be in extreme better shape. This works for any brand too. And it will be defensible. This wasn't working, so we changed this thing. This was working, so we kept going. This wasn't working, so we swapped it out. And putting a framework like that in place for you or the brand you work for for the year is a surefire way to actually quantify things and get to improvement that I cannot recommend more. There's a ton more that I want to walk through, but I know in these more technical videos that often some of this can be overwhelming. Like I mentioned before, I will put the content pillars spreadsheet template I have down below, so if you're looking to do something like that, you can have an example for it. But overall, I cannot encourage you enough to just pick one thing, one thing here, similar to my start-of-the-year video. Concentrate on adding one thing to your life. I'm going to organize the footage I shoot on my iPhone. I'm going to put together the reference database I have. Oh, I'm working with a small team and we're chaotic. I'm going to put the tracker together. I'm going to stay on people to do it. Facilitating that stuff, acting on it, will have a major impact in your creative life, and I cannot recommend it enough. I appreciate y'all so much for watching. Thank you again. year, you can get 90% off for six months using the link in the description. Thank you so much to Xero for partnering on this video. But getting more tactical, if you have clients or if you work at a job, the weekly update is something I did all through my professional career because a boss asked for it and I just kept it going, but will save you so much heartache, especially if you do freelance or client work. So what do I mean by this? At the end of every week you send out a simple email that says too long didn't read. Here's like two or three highlights of this week. You pull from the below, which is what got accomplished this week. So just a checklist. These are the things that happened. This is what's going to happen next week, what the plan looks like. And then blockers. Anything that's holding you back from achieving a goal or anything that didn't go as expected so that people know and if there's something that needs to be resolved, it's being escalated. So you've identified it, you've pulled it out, I still haven't received that doc, Jenny still hasn't gotten this or that. So you can very practically call out where things are. So then whoever client you have knows what you've done, knows what their expectation is of you next week, knows if they or their team or anything else is blocking you from getting the things they have done and can adjust from it. And if you follow this pretty simple structure, you are going to have way less issues with clients, people being mad about this or that, and it doesn't take long. And if you are managing a team, this is a great thing to ask for from them because then you have a view of what everyone is looking at and what everyone's doing and what they're doing next and where they're held up. The blocker section is really important. You are able to compile those things together in terms of what your team did to then present to a client or then present to an executive team and you're beginning to level all of that up. And this ties in this idea of a team tracker. So this is one of the tracker I have for carousels where basically it has a process doc up top, has another database down here with a name, who on the team is the designer, what's the status, what's the due date, what's the link for the final. If you are working with multiple people in any freelance scenario, as a team in a small agency or as a team at a company, as a team on a shoot, if all the things that people are supposed to do are tracked in one database, they all have dates and people assigned to them and they're getting checked off, you can easily look at, you can even auto generate reports with stuff like Notion AI will just give you a summary of this, of what's gotten done, what remains, who's assigned to what. In one of my previous jobs, we managed a pretty big creative team. We had four graphic designers, we had three people on the video team and it was very asset based. What asset are you doing for who there's tons of assets coming in and out. All the people around us were complaining they weren't getting their assets fast enough. When I came in to manage that team, one of the first things I did was put something like this into place where we actually had a form on the front end where people could request assets, the managers of the team would then review those and assign them to individuals and a date would get added, the person that requested it had visibility on what the date looked like. We did all this in ClickUp and then you could literally see what the queue looks like, how many were in front of it. We could review how many assets people were getting done each week. Are these requests tedious? Was there already an existing asset that was that was done? Does one person have more bandwidth than the others if new requests come in? We're logging it all in one place and importantly I could go back to the sales team or the product team or people requesting and being like hey there's 21 assets done this week, 11 for your team, 7 for your team. We have these many in the queue. Would you like to reprioritize any of these ones remaining? And all of a sudden everyone feels better about that process. But it starts again with just a simple database like this with the people you're working on for some accountability. And that relates to the idea of a process doc. So if you ever want to hire people or have people help you to do stuff, whether that's video editing you want done for you, writing, social media posting, whatever, most people assume, oh I'm just going to hire this person, they're going to do it all for me. But the more you have process in place, the better off it's going to go to actually bring them into your org. So the simplest way to look at process, because everyone gets a little turned off by that word, is for every single thing that you want someone else to work on. There's a document. In that document there is a loom, just a video screen share, showing what you do. So for instance how you log into this or the different walking through whatever board you're showing. Just give people video documentation. It doesn't have to be fancy or great looking. It's really helpful so they can watch in that step-by-step breakdown. You can take that loom, transcribe it, put it into chatGBT and it'll give you a step-by-step breakdown that you can review. But for anything, even from that carousel example I showed, in those carousels, the first slide is very specific. The core text needs to fit within the square in the middle. I need to have a photo inside each of those. It needs to be readable at the size on the explore page. So having a checklist for that where people have to say is this in the middle? Is orange in the photo? Is it readable at a small size on the explore page? Same thing on the back end. We have two variants for each one. One is a menu chat with a comment. One is just a go find whatever deliverable we have in a bios. We have two variants of all those. That's in the doc. We always do two variants. And then we have a figma board of existing assets that we have. And so being able to have a loom and walk through what that looks like, show examples so people can look through it visually. They have a checklist of all those steps. That becomes a process doc. So anytime a new designer comes on, we can add that into it. The last step on there, if you're hiring multiple roles, you begin to add FAQ on the bottom. What comes up every time when you're onboarding? What are the issues we hit? You add it to the process doc. So whenever someone new comes in, you're beginning to have to handle less of those same repetitive questions. So anyone who has scaled an agency, has scaled freelance work, has worked on a lot of shoots, has brought on remote help, has begun to do that kind of process. And it's literally just a folder inside your drive, your air, or inside your notion where you basically have these for all of the things that people are going to do to help you. They do not take long to set up. It will save you tons of time on the back end. So if your goal this year is I'm going to get help, or I've been trying to have YouTube editors or whoever, and it hasn't worked out, it's usually not the editor. It's usually that you don't have enough process and documentation in place. So this is a key thing to wrap your head around that will really help. And so those have all been really tactical, database driven stuff. That's not all the ways that you can get your creative life together. One that is still the best use for stuff like this, this best promotional tool for creatives is signature series for content. So if you're looking at how do I improve my content this year? How do I have a real plan? It's all around what is the most effective thing I've done? How do I serialize it? So for those of you that know me, you know, I have this series product versus brand. I review different products as a signature series that lots of people know me for. I want to shout out David. He's in cut 30 right now. I was crushing it before he came in in cut 32. And he has a signature series where basically brand building lessons like behind the brand. And he's done gentle monster. He's done beans, but he sits down. He has a very similar style each time. And he walks through in a similar visual way and a similar structural way. The stories behind some of these brands and in particular, their founders, he taps in there. It's a little different than everybody else, but he's kind of found his signature series. You can see him going from talking about all these different things to, Oh, I found my thing. And so if you are doing anything this year, is thinking about for my signature, whether it's something in my portfolio, or it's a content piece I'm making, if I was only to make one thing a week or one thing a month, how can I have that signature, that unique thing to me and then actually act on it. And then if you are working on social media for yourself or for a brand, et cetera, a content pillar system is the system that I teach all the times when I work with brands on what we teach inside cut 30 for individuals instituting a pillar system will get you good. What do I mean by a pillar? If you don't know pillar is a concept talking about food, talking about my portfolio videos, design, whatever. Plus, one or two formats, carousels, green screen, blogs, videos, every good creative who's online has three to five pillars at any given time. Same thing with brands. They have three to five types of content. We do carousels documenting our journey. We do product reels that are art directed, whatever it is, they have three to five things, but how you get good at it, how you can basically make the plunge this year to be excellent. This is measure that pillar system. So it's a spreadsheet that actually breaks down the views of each pillar each month, their average views per, the saves, the shares, the reach to new audiences versus old audiences and the hook rate. I will put my pillars doc down inside the description here so you can see it. If you measure those every month and you look at if it's going up or down, then you decide, are we going to improve our hooks? Are we going to change the production value? Or are we going to double down and swap this video some other way every month to see how you improve it? Don't change anything if it's steady state or remove it. You just give a decision matrix wherever every month you choose one of those improvements, you choose to keep it the same, or you choose to put it away and replace it with a new pillar. Within three months of being like, we're going to change hooks, we're going to evaluate the entire next month, your social media will be in extreme better shape. This works for any brand too. And it will be defensible. This wasn't working, so we changed this thing. This was working, so we kept going. This wasn't working, so we swapped it out. And putting a framework like that in place for you or the brand you work for for the year is a surefire way to actually quantify things and get to improvement that I cannot recommend more. There's a ton more that I want to walk through, but I know in these more like technical videos that often some of this can be overwhelming. Like I mentioned before, I will put the content pillars kind of spreadsheet template I have down below. So if you're looking to do something like that, you can have an example for it. But overall, I cannot encourage you enough to just pick one thing, one thing here, similar to my start of the year video. Concentrate on adding one thing to your life. I'm going to organize the footage I shoot in my iPhone. I'm going to put together the reference database I have. Oh, I'm working with a small team and we're chaotic. I'm going to put the tracker together. I'm going to stay on people to do it. Facilitating that stuff, acting on it will have a major impact in your creative life and I cannot recommend it enough. I appreciate y'all so much for watching. Thank you again.