Hello š¤ļø
My Decorex presentation is packed (a throwback to the good old days of double-sided tape and superglue), and wardrobe has finally produced style direction for the event.
When this hits your inbox, I will be on a train heading south from Edinburgh.
The recurring message of this weekās newsletter is that work that isnāt firmly in the calendar doesnāt get done.
The blog launches this year's Big Push and helps you select a meaningful task to finish before Christmas.
Then a report from an extra session I ran for the Designers' Boardroom on Instagram, which turned out to be about time rather than Instagram, and which prompted me to analyse my own data to see just how much social media actually matters. More on this in My Week In Hothouse.
Then an invitation to start preparing, now, for the annual review Iāll be running in Hothouse on 26 November.
1. This Week's Blogpost: Finish It Before Christmas - The Big Push 2026
Most of us have a task that has been hanging around for months. It is not difficult and it is not unimportant, yet every week it gets relegated.
Twenty designers took part in the Big Push in 2025. When I went back through their pledges, I expected the difference between those who finished and those who drifted away to be commitment, talent or workload. It was none of those. It was what they had chosen to pledge. Habits faltered, because a habit has no finish line. Tasks with a measurable end got done.
So most of this year's post is about choosing. It sets out six tests for a good pledge and rebuilds three of last year's pledges that didnāt serve. It also explains why we should dig into whatās holding us back.
The reporting deadline is Friday 4 December, which leaves the rest of the month clear for whatever you fancy.
Pledge forms are due by Tuesday 20 October, and the pledge ceremony is on Thursday 22 October at 10am. If you missed Thursday's launch session, the recording is here.
2. Steve Gets Half a Day
Last week I ran an extra session for members of the Designers' Boardroom, my year-round accountability groups. The purpose was to give us all, me included, a firm push on Instagram. Social media posting comes up so often in our regular meetings that it earned an extra-curricular session of its own. The timing was perfect to harness autumnal back-to-school energy.
Instagram in particular comes up every week in my one-to-ones. The sales pipeline is a constant source of anxiety. Designers almost always know what they ought to be doing about it, but often that marketing gets bumped by things that feel (but arenāt) more urgent and/or important. Itās the time-lag in results from marketing - the disconnect between action and result - that makes it feel deferrable.
If you struggle to keep your own commitments to marketing on social media, look at this list and point to the stage, or stages, where your intention breaks:
- Strategy: knowing who you are for, what sets you apart, what you talk about
- Protecting time in the diary
- Gathering raw material: photographs, clips, work to show
- Planning the next batch
- Creating the posts: captions, editing, templates
- Publishing
- Replying to comments and messages
- Moving conversations towards an enquiry
- Reviewing what worked, and adjusting
We ran this as a poll in the session, and number 2 was the main culprit: protecting time in the diary.
So I asked a blunt question. If Instagram is your main marketing channel, how much of your week does it reasonably deserve? The answer came back at once: half a day. One designer said it was a stark but fair way of putting it. A couple of others admitted they lose at least that much each week to questionable distractions.
That matches my own rule of thumb for a sole practitioner. With six months or more of work booked, you are in maintenance marketing, and it needs half a day a week. With less than six months, you are in growth marketing, and it needs a whole day.
None of us would bump a client to make room for something else, so we give marketing a client's name. Marketing is called Steve. Steve has half a day in the diary every week, and Steve does not get bumped. Sorry, something else will have to give.
I publish my numbers here every week, and this week I ran a quick analysis of them with Claude (see My Week below for the numbers). The pattern is plain as.
I stopped posting regularly on the yellow dates: look at the abundance of red that follows.
When I am active on social media, more of the right people find me.
At the end of the session we made a pact: one post a week, minimum, from now until Christmas. That includes me. This is the part of the Boardroom that matters most. A resolution made in front of people who will ask about it is harder to abandon.
3. Prep With Me: The Annual Review.
On Thursday 26 November I am running an annual review session in Hothouse. It is open to everyone, whether or not you are taking part in the Big Push. The link to join this initiative will be in the Hothouse group nearer the time.
I'm running it because last December I took half a day to review my own business, and that review shaped this year more than any other single piece of work. It helped me resolve both practical and psychological challenges. For example, it predicted self-sabotage was a major threat to my business: that unless I persuaded myself I had earned success, I might fumble it. So I added 'worthiness' to my weekly stats and have worked intentionally to drive this from 6.5 in January to 8.3 this month.
I expect to make significant changes to my business next year, I expect this review process to reveal what those changes should be.
A review is only as good as the material you bring to it, though. Half a day with nothing prepared produces impressions. Half a day with weeks of thinking behind it produces decisions. So I have started preparing already, and if you would like to work alongside me, this is what I have done so far.
1. A home for it. I have set up a project in Claude (AI) called Annual Review. Any AI assistant that lets you keep a project or workspace will do. The point is that everything goes in one place, so that by November the assistant holds weeks of context about your business, and each conversation picks up where the last one stopped rather than starting cold.
2. A purge. Before anything constructive, I wrote down everything that is bugging me about my business: the worries, the unanswered questions, the irritations and the things I am avoiding, unedited and unflattering. No plan for 2027 will be a good one unless it tackles these issues head on. If nothing else, it felt great to get all of this on āpaperā.
3. Where the time goes, and what it earns. I am now analysing how I spend my hours, and how profitable each of my activities is. Start with whatever you already have: your calendar, any timesheets, and the year's invoices. A rough answer is fine. Dividing what each activity earned by the hours it took is often the most revealing calculation in the whole review. I always think I know which of my services is most profitable, but I donāt, and it surprises me every time.
There is heavy stuff coming. There will be an extensive questionnaire that covers every operational area of the business, asks you to gather information, and asks for long, considered answers. I will share it in early November, so that you can work through it before the 26th.
If you would like to prepare with me, this week's task is small. Set up the project and write the purge. It took me about ten minutes. If you are wary of what you share with an AI, keep it general and leave out names, because the exercise works just as well without them.
Then on the 26th you will arrive with your material assembled, and we can spend the session on what to do about it.
4. Coming Up in Hothouse
š Monday 12 October, 11am. Decorex. I am presenting on positioning at the Business & Interiors Design Circles roundtable, and I'll be in every day until Wednesday. If youāll be there, let me know.
š Tuesday 20 October. Big Push pledge forms due. The form is in the Hothouse group.
š Thursday 22 October, 10am. The Big Push: pledge ceremony. Live online. Link in the Hothouse group.
š Thursday 26 November, 10.30am. Annual review. Open to everyone.
š Friday 4 December. Big Push deadline.
š Thursday 10 December, 10am. Big Push celebration and wash-up.
š Designers' Boardroom, 2027. Email me to find out more.
š Business in a Box is under way, with the Practice System built into the course.
And, take a look at the BIID Events page for the AI and Fees CPDs I'm running in the next couple of months.
5. My Week in Hothouse
As mentioned above, research for the Designersā Boardroom Instagram session drove me to analyse my regular data. NB I will do this more thoroughly for the annual review.
What the numbers say
This is my business data, forty weeks into 2026. The columns that capture my Instagram (and LinkedIn) posts turn red from 1st May, and mostly stay red. The exception is one fortnight at the end of May, when I posted nine and then eleven times on LinkedIn, and eight and then eleven times on Instagram.
The comparison runs like this:
- Instagram followers. About 23 new followers a week from January to April. About 11 a week since June, and about 4 a week over the last eight weeks.
- LinkedIn impressions. Usually in the hundreds from January to May, often above 1,000, with a peak of 2,555 in April. Since the start of August they have not reached 120 in any week, and last week they were 6.
- Mailing list and Hothouse group. Both are still growing, but at less than half the pace. Each was gaining about five a week before May and is gaining about two a week now.
The late-May fortnight - when I put on a spurt - is the nearest thing I have to a controlled experiment. Instagram gained 35 and then 60 followers in those two weeks, against a usual 20 or so. LinkedIn impressions reached 1,623. Then I stopped, and within a few weeks everything had flattened.
Other things changed this summer as well: I found myself single after 21 years, I moved house, and I built a massive new course. So this is a correlation, not proof. But the fortnight is hard to explain any other way, and Iāve seen the same effects under the same conditions before. I know that posting on social media makes a big difference.
My own Big Push. I am still working on this. If I werenāt already running the year end review, it would be this. Iāll have a think post-Decorex if thereās something scary I could use the Big Push to make myself doā¦
Final Word
Steve, the Big Push and the annual review are three versions of the same argument. Intentions are cheap. The work that matters most has to be given a time, a date and the kind of visibility that makes it hard to postpone. Put one of them in your diary before you close this email.
See you next Sunday, from the other side of Decorex.
Julia
Founder, Hothouse
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