7 May 2024 · 10 min
In this episode of the Professional Creative Podcast, host Bonnie Christine expands on the idea that even a small slice of time—15 minutes—can be a powerful catalyst for progress toward creative and business goals. She reflects on how everyone has roughly the same amount of waking hours each day, yet outcomes differ based on how that time is allocated. Bonnie shares personal anecdotes about her own struggles with procrastination, poor habit choices, and the importance of aligning daily actions with core priorities. She introduces practical tactics for eliminating “barriers to entry” such as pre‑saving logins, keeping art supplies visible, and charging a Kindle in the car so that when a 15‑minute window appears, the listener can dive straight into productive work. The episode also includes a sponsor read for ConvertKit, highlighting its email‑marketing features for creators. Throughout, Bonnie delivers a mix of motivational hard talk and concrete, low‑effort habits designed to help creative entrepreneurs reclaim micro‑time, structure their day, and consistently move toward larger, profitable outcomes.
Chapters
Well, hello and happy Tuesday. I have just kind of a short
thought for you today that I've been thinking about.
In our last episode, number 137, I talked about five different strategies to overcome fear. And I talked about one of them being to do one thing every day that moves you towards accomplishing your goals. And I quickly mentioned that 15 minutes count. And I was thinking later about how often we feel like we don't even have 15 minutes. And so I want to give you a little bit of hard talk today, but it's coming from a place of love because I've given myself this hard talk as well, because I would actually argue that we really have more like 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes, no matter what.
I'm Bonnie.
Christine.
And this is where all things creativity, design and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, is wildly profitable. Welcome to the professional creative Podcast.
You see, we all have. Let's go back to using the 15 minute as our example. We all have 15 minutes in our day. We're just doing something else with it. You know, something that I remember thinking a long, long time ago is that time is such a funny thing. Like everyone on Planet Earth, me, you and Oprah herself all have the same amount of time in every single day. Time is fixed and we all have to sleep and we need enough sleep, right? So we really all have, give or take an hour or so, the same amount of time every day, depending on how much we sleep. And side note, I'm a big advocate for getting enough sleep, like eight or nine hours every single night. So anyways, I remember thinking like, well, wow, we're all just doing drastically different things with the time that we have. And this is really evident from the places that we end up, right? And when you think about just the huge stretch of, you know, success, if you will, or big goals accomplished, like, it really depends on how we spend our time. And so we're all spending our time so incredibly differently because some of us reach our goals, some of us don't. Some of us go on to do bigger things than we ever thought. And so I love to just constantly think about the people who are far, far beyond me and where I even ever aspire to be. And like, how did they get there? What did they do with their time to become that great, right? And so it really comes down to what we choose to do with our time. And I'm right there with you. I make poor choices all the time. I do stupid things like choose, I don't know, looking at Pinterest or watching a TV show on Netflix over working on my goals or dreams or sometimes even spending time with my family. Now I, I wouldn't actually choose that, you know, when you put it that way. But when I look at my behavior, I like I did, I did do some things that I don't agree with, right? Like I don't agree with watching a show on tv, overdoing the most important things in life and spending really quality time with the people who I love the most. So we have to kind of work to bring that all into alignment. Are we aligning our, our time with the things that we truly know and believe are our biggest priorities? Now, I know that some of you listening really are struggling. Like maybe you have two jobs and you are as a single parent and you have little ones or you're homeschooling or you're just trying to make ends meet. And I would still say 15 minutes we've got. And so oftentimes we need to kind of set ourselves up for success so that when those glorious 15 minutes arrives, we can get straight to it.
Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your inbox? Or worse, having your emails end up in your subscribers spam folders? I know that feeling, which is why I switched to ConvertKit as my email service provider many years ago. ConvertKit is the email marketing platform built by creators for creators. With ConvertKit you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your subscribers are not only going to open, but also love. They have a drag and drop email editor that makes it easy to design emails that look and feel professional without any coding. Plus, their powerful automation tools make it easy to send the right message to the right person at the right time. But that's really not all. ConvertKit's tagging and segmenting tools make it so easy to send targeted messages to your subscribers based on their interests and behaviors. So, for example, you can imagine that on my email list I have people who are interested in buying my fabric to use in their projects and then also people who want to learn how to design their own fabric. And so through ConvertKit's tagging system, I can communicate to those two different groups of people so that I don't ever have to worry if I'm bugging the other group with something that they're not interested in. You can also use ConvertKit to actually build out a page and a form so that you can easily grow your email list and turn subscribers into customers. So you know that we always want you to be growing your email list. And I can tell you that if you dive into ConvertKit, you can start adding subscribers to your email list within a day of focused effort. It's not that difficult. It's super easy to set up, build a landing page, put an opt in, and then start getting people on your list. So if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, I want you to head over to BonnieChristine.comResources and sign up for a free trial on ConvertKit today.
You can go ahead and dive in
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So a lot of times when I think about what needs to be accomplished, you know, maybe you need to log in and watch a lesson of a class or read that book or do the artwork, right? Well, a lot of those things kind of have a barrier to entry built in. Like taking an online class. You've got to like get your computer and figure out your login and find that email and remember your username and password and then figure out where you left off. And then if you're creating art, right? Well, my goodness, where are your art supplies? I don't know where I put them last. I've got to go find them and get them all out. And I don't have a place or I don't have a space or reading the book. Like maybe your Kindle is dead or you don't know where it's at or maybe you don't have the book that you need right in front of you. And so anytime that we're squished on time, I like to think about what pre work can we do what pre Deciding can we do so that we set ourselves up for success? Now, you can imagine, maybe you have a saved tab on your computer with a login already saved with your username and password, and you leave it right where you left off. That way, when the clouds part and you do have 15 minutes, you can use the entirety of those 15 minutes to be productive. Let's think about maybe getting all of the art supplies that you need. Maybe it's not even that many things. Maybe it's just one, you know, paint palette and a brush, a glass of water and a canvas. Maybe you leave that out somewhere that you see it all the time. What we see, we think of, and what we don't see, we don't think of.
Right.
Out of sight, out of mind, insight in mind. And so we can structure our day to day to set ourselves up for success. Maybe you have the Kindle in your car charged up so that when you're stuck in traffic or you're waiting in car pickup, you can be productive. So those little pockets of time, those windows of time, sometimes we know when they're coming, but sometimes we don't. Like an unexpected, I don't know, kids are napping or unexpected. Someone brings you dinner and you don't have to cook. And so then all of a sudden, oh, my goodness, I've got those 15 minutes. Go ahead and pre decide what you're going to do with the time when it arrives so that you don't spend any of your 15 minutes deciding what you're going to do with your 15 minutes. Do you see the big difference there? So we can pre decide. We can have rules that we follow because we've established them ahead of time. Okay, so talking to myself here as well. Friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there is room for you.