You’ve had a long day at work. Your eyes are closing, and every part of you screams for that pillow. Yet rather than passing out right away, you first take the time to brush your teeth, wash your face and carry out the rest of your usual nightly routine. Why? Well, you’ve developed a good habit, which is why most people will take the time to brush their teeth before bed, no matter how tired they are or how much sleep calls to them.
What does brushing your teeth have to do with adult industry work, you may ask?
Well, creating effective habits can help strengthen and support your wider overall work gameplan in a way that benefits your work/life balance. That way, you can work towards your goals without getting overwhelmed by the intense demands put on online content creators.
Let’s cover some basic principles to help you achieve that:
- How to Create Habits
- Stacking Habits
- Improving Your Workflow
HOW TO CREATE HABITS
To some degree, we are all creatures of habit, but oftentimes we don’t even realize that we’re engaging in a habit. That’s the beauty of habitual activity: it’s an activity we no longer need to think about doing. Like Ariana Grande says, it happens “just like magic.” Habits themselves are neutral. They can be good for you, bad for you or meh for you, but the characteristics are always the same: they’re an action that we’ve done so many times in a row that our brain automatically does the task at hand. Consequently, it doesn’t cost us a lot of thinking.
Let’s apply this to creating a habit — specifically, a positive habit — that will help you organize your workflow: updating a platform that you make money on.
The need to consistently update your money-making platforms is one key to success in today’s online content creation space. Your fans want your attention, they want new content and they want you to message them. They’re quite a needy little group! How can we guarantee that we regularly update that money-making platform? Very simply, you set aside a time during the day, and you do nothing else during that time.
Nothing else? Nope, nothing else at all. You have to combat those other habits you picked up, like checking Twitter constantly, seeing how many likes you got on that hot picture you put up and so on. Instead, you need to focus on the task at hand.
How long should it take you to do this? Less time than you might think. Updating with a text post takes a few minutes. Updating with a picture post? Also a few minutes. Updating with a video… well, okay, you have to upload the video and wait for it to process, but even that shouldn’t take an unreasonable amount of time.
During the first few days, this may seem a little tedious. During the first couple of weeks, it may feel like a chore. But if you do this daily for a month, and dedicate yourself to setting that time aside, you’ll soon find the habit is there. It gets easier to do, and you start to do it with little or no effort. Congratulations! You’ve just created a lasting habit.
STACKING HABITS
Stacking habits? No, thank you. It’s bad enough I have to create one habit. Now you want me to stack them? Forget about it!
Well, remember what I said about brushing your teeth? Most people don’t just brush their teeth. I’ve personally witnessed some amazingly complicated stacked habits just by observing others’ bedtime rituals. That simple habit of brushing the teeth gets combined with removing makeup, applying creams from expensive-looking bottles, followed by some face-mask thing to, um, do something… Okay, I’m out of my league here talking about these rituals, but rituals do look like stacked habits when you start to pick them apart.
Let’s take that habit of updating your paid platforms. Once you finish that each day, what should you do? Of course, you can spend time answering your paid DMs. Now, between updating your page, then answering DMs, guess what? You’ve stacked two productive habits. Add something else! Maybe update your social media, informing people that you just updated your paid platform. Voila. A three-stack.
Wait a minute, stacking habits is that easy? Why, yes, it is, and soon you’ll find that your productivity is through the roof.
IMPROVING YOUR WORKFLOW
As you can see, developing productive habits and stacking productive habits can help you replace procrastination about what to do next with daily actions that you no longer have to expend extra time thinking about. In the long run, it will save you from fatigue, it will always guarantee that you follow through and — more importantly — it will give you the opportunity to assess what works and what doesn’t work. If you’ve been posting daily, you can review statistical information on what types of posts your fans like and figure out what you should do more of.
Assessing your work is important, but you have to have a body of work to understand what works and what doesn’t. If you posted once on a timeline and gave up, what does that tell you about the content you produce? What does that tell you about the platform? It tells you very little. Having the habits of creating new posts, updating timelines and so on will help you to see which post sold, what worked, which message hit and more. Creating habits, stacking habits and then assessing the results from those habits will ultimately improve your workflow and improve your money-making potential.
Andrew Loyal is the support manager for Loyalfans, an all-inclusive fan club platform. Find him on Twitter @andrewloyalfans and contact social@loyalfans.com for promotional opportunities. Loyalfans can be followed @realloyalfans on both Twitter and Instagram.