Steal Back 10 Hours Every Week: A Better Workflow for Interior Designers

Synopsis

✔ You cannot manage time. You can only manage your behaviors around time.

✔ Time-shrinking thoughts like “I’m so busy” and “I’ll never get it all done” become your reality, because you live into your expectations.

✔ Track every waking hour for one week in 15-minute increments. It will reveal your revenue rabbit holes and your dollarized detours.

✔ Sort every task into four categories, assign each category its own days, and block the week by the previous Friday.

✔ Set your communication windows at the start of the project, put them in your letter of agreement, and stop answering on weekends.

✔ Most designers work 60 hours and bill nowhere near what those hours are worth. This is where you find your leaks.

You Cannot Manage Time. You Can Only Manage Your Behaviors.

Time is a human construct. It does not exist beyond the calendars and clocks we invented to keep ourselves on schedule. And it is our greatest non-renewable resource. You came into this world with a birth certificate and no expiration date on it, which means it is entirely on you to make the most of each moment.

Making the most of each moment does not mean handing your whole life over to work. It means being productive beyond busy. Busy does not mean productive. Productivity is what drives profitability, satisfaction, and the love of your business. Busy burns you out.

Here is the sequence that changes everything. When you control the action in your hours, you take charge of your days. When you take charge of your days, your weeks get productive. Productive weeks lead to profitable months, and profitable months become years of growth that deliver the income, the impact, and the life you have been dreaming about.

The Thoughts That Are Shrinking Your Time

Listen to what you say about time, because you are living into it.

• I don’t have enough time. We all know people with the same hours in the day who get a great deal more done. 
  
• I’m so busy. That is my designers’ personal favorite, and it is a time shrinker, not a time expander. I’ll never get it all done. You set an expectation, and you will live into it. 
  
• My time is not my own. When it is not yours, whose is it? Are you giving yourself away to your clients? To your team? Are you disorganized and in a perpetual scramble?

Those are choices. I want you to own them so you can make new and empowering ones instead of staying captive to poor ones.

There’s so much on my plate. Who is in charge of loading your plate? When this is a dinner table, you would be. This is the dinner table of your business, so the answer is you.

Now flip them.

There is always enough time to get it done.

• I know how to prioritize and use time effectively. We all do what we most want to do in the end. That last one is profoundly true. When you are not getting to something, it is rarely that you lack the time. It is that you do not really want to do it, which means you get to decide: does it need to get done, can it be delegated, or can it be deleted? 

Deletion is a possibility a surprising amount of the time. We create work for ourselves that never needed to exist.

I don’t have to do it all. You can build a team. You can hire. You can outsource to talented professionals online.

There is no hurry, because haste makes waste and mistakes create expenses you never planned for.

And my favorite: I have the space and ease for everything to unfold. Say it in the morning. It is crazy powerful.

Thoughts and beliefs are choices. They are not facts until you make them so. Facts are your reality. Beliefs can be changed. Look closely at yours and you will find room to choose differently.

Step One: Track Your Time for a Full Week

This is the pain before the gain, and you are not going to love it.

I want you to track your time for at least one week. I ask my private clients for two weeks and they are usually good for about four days. The longer you go, the better your data.

This is not billable hour tracking. This is from the moment you open your eyes in the morning to the moment you close them at night, in 15-minute increments, in a little book you carry with you.

When you are getting lost in social media, you will find out when and where and how. When you are losing two or three hours a night to television, you will see it. When you are losing time to contractors, to vendors, or to constant interruptions from your team, it will show up in black and white.

This is what brings the time sucks and the time detours to light. I call them revenue rabbit holes and dollarized detours, because time is money and this is exactly where yours is leaking.

And before you tell me you already know where your time goes: I have done this with clients, and every single time they come back stunned by what they found.

Step Two: Build Your Master Task List and Sort It

Grab paper and something to write with. Write down every professional task you do during the course of your business week. Start with Monday and move through to Friday. That is simpler than randomly pulling tasks out of the air.

Now go through that list with four highlighter colors. Four colors is more fun and much faster than tracking initials in your head. I started with 12 categories once and it was the most colorful creation ever, and far too complicated. Four is the sweet spot.

1. Personal Care

Yes, this is the first. Getting showered and dressed. Exercise, meditation, yoga. Gardening. Meals. Time with family. All of it counts and all of it belongs on your calendar.

When you do not take care of yourself, you will not be available to take care of your family, your clients, or your business. When there is not enough personal care on your list, add some. A 30-minute walk a day is a fine place to start.

2. Business Building and Marketing

Social media. Networking events. Anything that fills your pipeline. When you are tinkering with your own website, it lands here, and I would rather you outsource it.

Peer events are a slightly different animal. Those support your practice more than they build it, so be strategic about where you categorize them.

This category requires an investment of time that will not happen by accident. And when you are about to tell me your business is entirely word of mouth, know this: the majority of designers who say that to me are struggling with non-ideal clients because they have simply taken whoever showed up. I did that for my first five years, and I paid dearly for it.

3. Creative Thinking and Creative Delivery

Presentation boards, mood boards, selection boards, sourcing, floor plans, construction documents, elevations, renderings. This is the category that truly delivers the money to your business. Marketing requires an investment. This is where you collect on it. It is also the lion’s share of what you do.

4. Admin and Preparation

The stuff that makes you grind your teeth and feel like you are chewing foil. Invoicing. Reconciliations. Bookkeeping. Most of procurement. This is office manager work, and I want you handing it off lock, stock, and barrel. I do not want you spending your days on the pieces of your business that rob your energy.

Step Three: Assign Your Days

This one was a game-changer for me, and I have been doing it for decades.

Here is how my week is assigned:

✔ Monday: business building and admin. In office. I am not going anywhere.

✔ Tuesday: clients and creative.

✔ Wednesday: creative only.

✔ Thursday: clients and creative.

✔ Friday: completions and mapping next week.

I do not allow clients every day of the week. I did not allow it in my design practice and I do not allow it in my coaching practice. When I was designing full time, installs and client visits happened on Tuesdays and Thursdays only. That made scheduling effortless. Standing in a client’s living room, I could say “let’s get you on the calendar” and know exactly which two days were on offer.

Wednesday was my full creative day, and I needed it. When I was heading to ADAC to source across 60 showrooms, I needed a big block. Presentation boards, a big block. CAD, a big block. Creative work does not fit in the cracks.

Step Four: Protect the Uninterrupted Time

I already know what you are going to say. Melissa, I never get uninterrupted time. Between my team and my clients I am pulled in five directions at once.

So let’s fix that.

When you have a team, set a communication schedule with them. A team meeting on Mondays. A wrap up on Fridays. And office hours for questions, which you get to define. One hour a day, or an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Outside of those windows, unless something is genuinely on fire, they hold their questions. Ideally you have a project manager fielding the urgent items anyway.

One client of mine had an office that was far too accessible. He started closing his door and hanging a pad of paper and a pencil on the outside of it. Questions get written down. And here is the beautiful part: sometimes the question disappears entirely, because they found the answer another way.

When you make yourself available every minute, you end up micromanaging and your team becomes codependent. Those are two words that have no business in your business.

Step Five: Set Communication Boundaries at the Start

Vendors, clients, and contractors all need to know what hot and burning actually looks like, and they need to know it at the start of the project, not in the middle of it.

What I found effective was telling clients up front that I respond to emails, voicemails, and texts between eight and nine in the morning and again between four and five in the afternoon. The reason I gave them is the honest one: it lets me make their project work a priority, maintain progress, move faster, and produce the creative results we are known for.

They love it. Not one client has ever pushed back, because I set it up that way at the very start and I do not break my own boundaries.

Your office hours can be whatever you choose. Twelve to eight. Seven to three. Eight to four. They do not need to be 10 and 12-hour days facing the public, and frankly, I do not want them facing you privately either. I am an early bird, so I am in my office early and I knock off at three or four. I coach night owls who start later. Your business is meant to be designed for you.

A few boundaries worth holding:

➜ Do not answer email, text, or voicemail outside your stated hours. When you do, you have trained them that your boundaries are decorative.

➜ Do not answer the phone for a client on the weekend. When that means a separate business phone, get one. I am deadly serious. For three years I had a client who called every Sunday at 8 a.m. to tell me what she found in her magazines. I never once answered.

➜ Put your boundaries in your letter of agreement. They set the expectation from day one and they put you clearly in charge.

➜ Do not check your phone when you open your eyes. That is the moment you hand control of your day to someone else and put every voice in your inbox in charge of you.

The Billable Hours Math Nobody Wants to Look At

Here is what my blocked calendar looks like when I grid it out and view it as a pie.

In a 60-hour week, personal care is nine hours, or 15 percent. Admin is three hours, or 5 percent, because it is heavily outsourced. Marketing is nine hours, or 15 percent. That leaves 65 percent billable, which is 39 billable hours.

I will lay you money you are not billing that many hours, and I will bet you are working more than 60.

When I started with my client Jenna, the first thing she told me was that she had her biggest billing month ever. She gave me the number. Based on the hours she was putting in, she should have billed more than twice that. In our very first session, we found a massive leak.

Which is exactly why I have such a burning drive to move you out of hourly and into value-based fees, where your compensation actually reflects what you deliver.

Block by the Week, Not by the Day

Do not do this a day at a time. Block a full week minimum, and do it by the previous Friday rather than on Sunday night. You get your Sunday night back. You get your weekend back.

And put real names in the blocks. Not “creative design” but “Smith project.” Not “client meeting” but “Hasselhoff meeting.” Not “installation” but “Robert’s installation.” When you name it, you see exactly where your time is invested, and you see that the time is uninterrupted. That is the magic.

Is it flexible? Absolutely. Block an hour of flex time a day when you want it. What blocking removes is the decision fatigue, the trying to remember, and that space of overwhelm. Overwhelm and overthinking are choices too, by the way. I do not recommend either one.

You step into every day knowing exactly what is in front of you. No more wondering how you will get it all done, because it is already mapped, planned, and blocked.

Deadlines Get the Money in the Door Faster

Designers are famously poor deadline talents. I love deadlines, because a deadline means the money arrives that much sooner. For many years, I turned projects in 90 days.

Put an estimated deadline on every project and build a timeline your client can see. Look at the end and work backwards. Whether the project runs three months, six months, 12 months, or five years, do this.

Giving a client even an estimated timeline is thrilling for them. They finally see a point at which this will be finished. Stress that it is estimated. Give it every disclaimer you want about logistics and contractors and force majeure. It still makes you infinitely more professional, because the contractor is not going to hand them a timeline and they know it.

Your deadline also lets you schedule milestone payments, work confidently with flat fees, and know exactly when you can take on new projects.

Block Your Year in December

Sit down in December and set your calendar for the next 12 months.

Block your vacations. That is vacations with an S on it. Then block quarterly recharge time, and my preference here is 72 hours. When you are going to push back, 48 is the floor. You cannot drop to 24 on this one.

A staycation counts, as long as it is somewhere decadent, somewhere you will let yourself imagine and dream and visualize what you want next. Not a place where you will work in the business. 

This is your sacred time as CEO, chief visionary, and chief creative, not as chief employee. Preferably not with friends or colleagues, and this is not a romantic weekend with your spouse. When you have a business partner, bring them.

One of my clients, a fabulous designer with a team in Boston, fought me on this. She insisted she could not take the time. She finally went to a local five-star hotel during a heavy snowstorm and came back saying it was the best thing she had ever done and she could not wait for the next one.

Here is why it works. The first 24 hours is decompression, the exhale, the letting go. The next 24 is when your imagination kicks back in and you start percolating. Go to a museum, a gallery, a show. Whatever inspires you.

Then block your industry events. High Point, Vegas, Dallas, Maison et Objet, Salone del Mobile, Future of Home. When you do not block them, they will not happen. And when you block them early, you make your air and hotel reservations early and you get much better rates.

Knowledge Is Not Power. Action Is.

I work with a designer in Mallorca named Justine who runs a full-time interior design business and a large retail operation at the same time. Her goal was to cut back to four days a week. She came to the Go Beyond Intensive, learned time mastery and pricing, raised her rates, watched her revenue climb, and reorganized her team to cover the day she wanted off. She got her four day week.

You have that same ability. You simply have not deployed it, leveraged it, or harnessed it yet.

Some of my designers are slower to take action. Others are absolute race cars, and they achieve so much more because they move fast and they move big.

I want you in charge of your days. I want productive weeks, profitable months, and many years of endless growth.

About Melissa Galt

Melissa Galt is a sought-after business coach, marketing consultant, keynote speaker and workshop leader who empowers interior designers to build highly profitable businesses without the burnout. With three decades as the principal of her successful residential design firm, Melissa brings firsthand experience and proven strategies that empower creative professionals to earn more in less time, with less stress.

She is the author of four transformative books, Proximity to Profits: 50+ Strategic Locations to Meet Affluent Design Clients, Design Discovery: The Proven Process to Land Ideal Clients and Grow Profit, Marketing Luxury Design: Attracting Affluent Clients and The Language of Success: 35 Words to Boost Your Worth & Wealth, and the host of the Design Business Freedom™ podcast, where she shares unfiltered advice on mindset, money, and marketing for design pros ready to elevate their game.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should I time track before I start time blocking?

One week minimum, two weeks when you can. More data is more valuable. Track from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them, in 15-minute increments. This is not billable hour tracking. It is a complete picture of where your hours actually go.

What about clients who won’t accept limited communication windows?

They will, as long as you set the expectation at the start of the project rather than springing it on them mid-project. Tell them why: dedicated response windows let you protect their project work, hold your progress, and deliver the creative results you are known for. Put it in your letter of agreement so it is documented from day one.

How do I get uninterrupted creative time when my team keeps interrupting?

Set office hours for questions, whether that is one hour a day or an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Hold a Monday team meeting and a Friday wrap-up. Anything genuinely urgent should route to a project manager. Constant availability creates micromanagement and codependency, and neither one belongs in your business.

What are the four task categories?

Personal care, business building and marketing, creative thinking and creative delivery, and admin and preparation. Highlight your master task list in four colors, then assign each category to specific days so like work stays together.

Should I block my calendar daily or weekly?

Weekly, at minimum, and do it by the previous Friday. That way you step into your weekend without carrying work and worry, and you step into Monday already prepared. You also get your Sunday night back.

Why does my billing feel low when I am working so many hours?

Because almost every designer underbills. In a 60-hour week, 39 hours should be billable. Most designers are working well past 60 and billing a fraction of it. This is the single most common leak I find, and it is one of the strongest arguments for moving from hourly to value-based fees.

Do I really need a deadline on every project?

Yes. An estimated deadline lets you build a client-facing timeline, schedule milestone payments, work confidently with flat fees, and know when you can take on new work. It also makes you look infinitely more professional, because your contractor is not going to give them a timeline.

Listen to this episode on Design Business Freedom™ Podcast – Episode 201

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