My first thought today is, “What? It’s Friday? Really?”

My second thought is, “Maybe I should have left my office more. This week doesn’t look all that interesting here.”

My third thought is, “It’s okay. You’ve gotta live your life first.”

How was your week? Mine was full of a lot of behind the scenes tasks that didn’t necessarily equate to pretty pictures. Business stuff is rarely photogenic but an absolute necessity. I revamped the Branch media kit and it was a good reminder that talking about your business and marketing yourself, no matter how many times you do it is still difficult. It’s one of those things that takes constant insight and practice. Once that was done, I reworked all our internal documents to match. The rest of my time was spent sending out a stack of estimates and taking a bunch of calls.

None of these moments leave room for pretty pictures…but that’s what real life often looks like. Sometimes, the things that matter just don’t translate visually to Instagram. But, getting shit done and keeping everything running smoothly is the most important.

I have fashion issues. All the damn time. You, too? Here’s your new uniform.

Cake stands are my new favorite office hack to get my plants grouped together. I have a ton of tiny succulents and everything was feeling a bit cluttered so this did the trick.

It’s so crazy that it’s already been a year since I moved into this studio space. During the first six months, I was traveling constantly and had a hard time finding a rhythm so it feels good to be home for the foreseeable future, making progress. Traveling is exciting but it often forces you to put your business on hold because you have very little time to take on new things — it becomes a balancing act where you’re just trying to maintain what you have going on. The last month home has been AWESOME. Things I had on my list for two years are getting crossed off which leads to the next topic…

I want to personally thank every one of you who signed up for the Branch Bulletin, a new monthly newsletter from my design studio. Complete disclosure here: I was scared to death to send it out. That’s completely laughable, considering that I’ve been blogging for close to 15 years. But, blog posts can be edited again and again. Mailing lists? Once you hit send, a few hundred (or more) folks have your message sitting in their inbox. There’s no going back.

I sat on that first newsletter all day, writing and re-writing. Was it good enough to send? Where was all this performance anxiety coming from? A deadline is a deadline! Finally, I pushed send.

The reason I’m telling you this story is that there are some things in life that aren’t the most fun to do. They are hard so we keep putting them off. Putting a project off for a day then turns into a week, then a year, then two years. I’d been wanting to write a newsletter for TWO WHOLE YEARS.

On Friday, after I sent the first one, I wondered why I hadn’t made the time earlier. Go do that thing you need to do. It’s not as bad as you think. Run that errand, hit send on that email, ask for that promotion, sign that lease on a creative work space, clean out your closet, publish your first blog post. You can do it!

P.S. In case you didn’t sign up in time, you can read the first one here. And if you have a mailing list of your own, let me know about it in the comments!

Happy Friday, friends. I hope it’s a good one!