Today I feel so grateful for how far I have come this year. When 2025 started, I was at one of the lowest and slowest points of my career. I spent a lot of time worrying about where my next project would come from. Looking back, I am thankful for that slow season because it taught me that work will always come eventually, and in waves.

Although I learned way more than these three lessons in 2025, the biggest one has been slowing down. I’ve implemented habits like the Pomodoro timer, monotasking, writing, and using a physical planner. As someone whose brain is constantly moving 10000 x an hour, this helps me to slow down and focus on where my feet are. From a young age, I was always wanting to rush and get things done, even in my work today. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the work; my brain just so quickly wants to move on to the next thing. I am taking an art class for the first time ever for fun, and it has truly taught me so much about this. All creativity, no matter the medium, requires a process and time to make the best decision on solutions. Sometimes I feel like I’ve learned more from this art class than my college degree because I’m choosing to go there. I’m choosing to be intentional with my creativity for the first time ever!

3 lessons learned in 2025:

1.Create a long-form content approach

As I grow as a designer and business owner, I find myself feeling really turned off by instant gratification and how cheap social media content feels. I want to provide value that will only increase over time. This is something that I am working on daily, but I truly found such joy in writing this year. Since I was a kid, I’ve always said that I hate writing. What made that change is my confidence in it. Turns out that my words and thoughts do matter even if they aren’t perfectly spoken. Not to mention that sitting down and writing for 30-60 minutes a week is much more therapeutic than creating content. It has given me such a great foundation that even making social media content is easier this way. I’ve found that spending time writing about something I’m passionate about fills my soul almost as much as design does.

2. When I get a lot of inquiries, space them out.

Since starting my life and career as a contract designer, I’ve had trouble balancing the really high highs and low lows. I’ve learned to set more boundaries, and if the client is flexible, I will move the project to my next available date. The right people will be willing to work with my schedule because they know I am the best fit for the job!

3. Get off your phone

If you take any piece of advice from this article, let it be this one. Slow down and spend time in your life outside of your phone. The constant influx of notifications breaks my creative focus. I have switched many things back to analog or physical this year, and I don’t feel like going back any time soon!

I finally used a paper planner for the WHOLE year.
I bought and use a radio alarm clock.
I have an “everything” journal. It changed everything to have one place to braindump whatever is on my mind.
I read more books
I got a DVD player

I set up DND and “work” mode to be on basically all the time. The only people that I allow to receive calls and texts from are my family, in case of an emergency!

All of these small changes throughout my year to feel more analog truly changed my life. It’s amazing how creative you will feel without all of the noise. This is another reason why I chose to White label design. It doesn’t feel as chaotic to me because I get to work in the background, just doing and creating things I love.

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