How A Gardening Ceramicist Organizes Their Days
"Well, if I show what planning is really like for me, it will probably make like 90% of your readers feel better about themselves, and maybe help some other neurodivergents out there.”
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In response to my piece on how How I Write Culture Study, I asked readers if they’d want to participate in a series where people from various professions talk about their work lives, explaining how they organize their days and weeks, how they protect their time, when and how they do their work and how and when they attend to their inbox, etc. etc.
Our first entry in the series was from a freelance audiobook narrator. Today, you’ll hear all about what it’s like to run a gardening ceramics business as an adult with ADHD. If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.
Now, let’s hear from Anne Fletcher about design, tricking her brain into managing the future, hating Quickbooks, and realizing it’s time for a business partner. I really loved her frank discussion of negotiating the complexity of her work alongside her adult ADHD diagnosis, and I think you will too.
Let’s start with how you described your work to me:
I run a small ceramics business making pots for starting seeds. My everyday work is about evenly split between shop concerns (clay chemistry, shipping deadlines, glaze making, purchasing supplies, etc) and customer communication about gardening, mostly via newsletter. As part of the gardening side, I do tons of research, especially focused on seeds.
I'm also mom to a 10-year-old. I coach her soccer team, and do all the school drop offs. I'm in charge of groceries and cooking at home. And bathroom cleaning! (My husband does laundry, tidying, dusting, vacuuming.)
Finally, I have ADHD, and really struggle to keep it all straight. For me, a lot of the day involves tricking my brain into doing what needs to be done instead of what's shiny. Which is an embarrassingly big chunk of my daily work.
Now, tell me about how you organize your day — or your week. You can do it like I did (breaking down each day of the week) or you can just do a pretty typical day, whatever makes sense for you.
As a parent, my day-to-day revolves around my kid’s schedule. Pre- parent life, my power band, in terms of work hours, was 7-10 am. Now, however, 7:30 - 9 is what we call the “morning show,” getting a kid up, fed and off to school. I flip between two morning schedules these days, depending on work load and sleep debt.
My “early schedule” involves setting the alarm for 6, and getting a mini-power band between about 6:15 and 7:45. That’s when I write my newsletter, work on promotions and other marketing stuff, also planning. Things that require focus and judgement.
Inevitably after a couple weeks of “early schedule” I begin to feel worn down, and I need to scale back. I’ll switch to a later schedule, basically getting up with my kid around 7:30, getting her to school, and back home to computer time by about 9:15 / 9:30.
For me, “computer time” is: administration, marketing, writing the newsletter, doing various website / software stuff, planning, and research. Four times a year I send out seeds to our seed club, and this involves tons of digging into small seed companies, meeting them (usually over email), researching which varieties to offer, and getting waaaaay into the details of the seeds and how to grow them.
Because the business is very seasonal, and because I’m doing most of the non-production work myself, what I do during “computer time” can be very different week-to-week. Some weeks I’m fully immersed in genetic diversity of kale varieties, for example, and other weeks I’ll be learning css code to add new formatting elements to an email template or landing page. And then there are the dreaded weeks when I have to catch up on bookkeeping and/or other paperwork administration stuff.
Most days I work at home until about 10 or 11, then head into the shop.
Usually when I arrive at the shop I’m greeted with something that’s broken, and that I have to fix right away. Last week it was a heater. Today the clay pump was clogged. Often the problems have something to do with our building’s sub-optimal electrical system, or with mysterious clay chemistry.
I don’t make our pots anymore. Thankfully I have a fantastic employee who has completely taken over production from making the clay all the way to firing the pots. I make sure she has all the raw materials ready to go (including mixing the batches of glaze for her), and then I do quality control and packing when the pots come out of the kiln.
These days I’m packing and shipping all the orders, though the shop runs better when we have someone else doing that job. I pack a tidy box, but I’m not super reliable about getting the shipping queue cleared each and every day. (See, fixing broken stuff, and ADHD, above.)
Other shop jobs that fit in and around the regular production and shipping flow: Gardening! We have a container garden out front of the shop that we try to keep looking nice and full of veggies and herbs. Packaging: Managing all the various kinds of cardboard packaging is a big job. Each product has its own custom box, plus all our shipping packaging comes in large bulk amounts that need to be stored and stocked. Inventory and purchasing: I need to keep an eye on what’s in stock and what needs ordering. Ideally that would be done on a regular cycle, but mostly I take stock during breathers between promotions and other periods of higher activity.
Depending on the day, and who is doing the school pickup, I head home between 2:45 and 6. Fridays I work until about 6:45 when I leave to play soccer at a field right next to work.
Afternoons are for grocery shopping, cooking, hanging with my kid, and / or getting exercise, depending on the day.
I’m *really bad* at having a fixed, repetitive schedule. I always knew that about myself, and my adult ADHD diagnosis has helped me put that tendency in perspective. Instead of trying (and failing) over and over to follow conventional advice and fit myself into a regular routine, I’ve learned that I need novelty in order to engage. I switch up elements of the routine every couple weeks, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. Going in and out of coaching youth soccer works really well for me: It’s an intense schedule for the 9 or 10 week season, and then it’s 12 weeks off.
How do you organize your future? (Planning for future work, planning for time off, etc.)
My first reaction: Hahahahaha! The future???? Then I thought, “I’m going to have to abandon this interview because I’m so bad at planning. No one wants to hear from me, and it’s maybe even irresponsible to disseminate ideas and habits like mine.” But finally I came round to, “well, if I show what planning is really like for me, it will probably make like 90% of your readers feel better about themselves, and maybe help some other neurodivergents out there.”
So, here goes:
The most consistent element of planning for me is that I change systems a lot. It’s the whole ADHD novelty thing. I can get very excited about a planning system and use it faithfully for a few weeks to a few months. And then I just . . . taper off. And find myself adrift with no planner. Then I’ll start up with a new system, and the cycle repeats.
For most of my life, I understood myself as deficient / lazy / flaky / undisciplined. I beat myself up a LOT. If only I could find the *right* system, I could stick with it and, you know, “live up to my potential.”
Now, though the shame and the emotional baggage are still definitely there, I understand that needing different, changing systems is an ok way to be, and there will never be just one system that’s perfect for me. There will always be multiples, and the trick is to manage the transitions between them so that all is not lost.
Here are the various systems I’m using right now, and how I use them:
Google calendar for appointments, meetings, and coordinating family stuff like school pick ups and drop offs. I have to use it ONLY for those specific, non-movable things, otherwise it risks losing novelty. As it is, my husband has to remind me regularly to put common events into our shared calendar so he can plan around them.
Monk Manual. This is a paper-based planner with undated layouts for month, week, and day. I love it because the layouts are really minimal, and they include reflection sections. I like being encouraged to look back at how I thought a day or week would go, and then see how it *actually* went. Sobering, but also useful for trying again next time, and not something I would do without the prompts.
There is also a little section to list three things you’re grateful for, and one thing you’re looking forward to, which can be very easy for me to forget. Even on a bad day, I’m grateful for a lot! And it’s important to always have at least one thing you’re looking forward to, even if it’s just the next cup of coffee.
Because the sections are all undated, I can use it for a few weeks or months, and then drop it for a few, and not feel like a total failure for wasting all those dated pages, which would stare at me like shame incarnate, and make me abandon the project altogether. I use the pdf version of the Monk Manual to lower the bar even more. There is no intimidating, expensive, bound book - just pages I print as needed.A google sheet I built to track tasks. I’ve tried all sorts of project management software, including most recently, Asana. And I’ve hated every one. They always seem to do so many annoying things I don’t want, but don’t do the things I find helpful.
My google sheet just does the very basics of task management for me: What is the task, when do I have to do it, and critically for me, how long will it take? That way I can see if I’ve assigned myself 14.5 hours of work for Monday, but 2.5 for Tuesday, and can rearrange appropriately.
Because my approach to getting things done in a day can be a bit haphazard and unpredictable, I try to only schedule about 3 hours of must-do work tasks per day (or maybe 5 - 6 on one day, but nothing the next day). That way there is wiggle room for broken pumps, low energy days, and inspiration to hyperfocus on a new project.
I also have a section called “overdue” in the sheet, so that when I come back after ignoring it for a while, I can wade through the backlog and either mark the tasks as done, or reassign them for the future. The tasks never go away or get lost, which is comforting.
Another thing that makes this sheet really friendly for me is that I’m always changing it a little - adding a new formula or conditional formatting, changing how repeating tasks are displayed, etc. It’s often more fun for me to tinker with the sheet itself than to do the tasks on the sheet. 20 minutes of tinkering adds novelty to the system, which then makes it much more appealing to face the tasks themselves.
Annual planning. For the last four or five years, I’ve done some sort of annual plan, setting out big picture things I want to achieve. I’ve used the Monk Manual system, which is about life + work (I think it was an online class a few years ago? Now I just reuse the template), and also a class taught by Sandra Booker, of sidekick COO, which is focused mostly on work. I don’t actually achieve most of what I set out to do, but it’s a very helpful check-in, and I think helps scaffold the year.
Paper notebook. For everything else, there is a plain paper notebook. I like these Decomposition Books because they’re spiral bound and unlined. This is perhaps the heart of the “system,” where I can kind of put anything, and it glues together the other systems.
I loosely follow the bullet journal system by numbering the pages and making an index at the front of the notebook so I can find things more easily.
How do you manage your income streams? Software, specific accountant needs, you can take this in whatever direction you need.
Up until this year, I had at least one if not two more jobs in addition to running Orta. For the last 15 years I taught design part-time, first at Stanford, and then at Berkeley when we moved across the bay. The budget for my whole department at Berkeley was cut last year, which was kind of a blessing in disguise. I miss the income, but I’m also very grateful for the extra time and mental space I have now. I’ve also tapered from full-time design research freelancing ten years ago to almost none now. There have been years where I received multiple W2’s and 1099s. We have an excellent tax accountant who helps sort out all that stuff.
As far as income streams and administration for Orta, it’s divided into two main buckets: 1) Online sales that are pretty much automatically tracked by Shopify (though there is a little extra work involved tracking the PayPal vs native Shopify payments); 2) Wholesale sales, where I get paid in a bunch of different ways (checks, direct transfers, PayPal, credit card) and which are a pain to track.
A couple years ago, I switched from Xero to Quickbooks for my bookkeeping because it’s what the bookkeeper my accountant recommended uses. Boy was that a mistake!
First of all: the bookkeeper fired me as a client. Which I don’t blame her for; because I’m the first to admit that I’m not a great client when it comes to remembering to fill out a form or return a spreadsheet explaining mystery charges or paying bills on time. However, she fired me by ghosting me and locking me out of my QB account, which was, you know, not ideal.
Once I got back into the account I was still stuck with QB, though without a bookkeeper to drive it, and it made me insane. I don’t think I’ve ever hated software more. The menus were super confusing to me, especially when I had to reconcile more complex transactions. (I should note that I’ve taken a whole year of accounting at community college. I’m good with *accounting*, just not *Quickbooks.*) The upshot is that I just couldn’t use QB properly, and lost more-or-less a year’s worth of detailed accounting info. For taxes that year, I ended up exporting all the transactions and sorting them manually in a MatLab program my husband wrote.
Finally I switched back to Xero last year, and my life is a LOT better. Strong recommend if you’re neurodivergent and fighting Quickbooks. The integration with my bank is a little clunkier, but the rest of it is so much better: clean, logical, functional. It works just like my accounting teacher taught us.
When it comes to banking as a small business owner, I’ve always had separate bank accounts for my personal life and business life. Separate debit and credit cards, everything. For someone who struggles with administration and record keeping, it’s extremely helpful to have all the work stuff automatically in its own separate bucket.
How do you think about “coworkers?”
I have one actual coworker, the woman who is running production now. Because I’m the boss, we’ll obviously never be the kind of coworkers on equal footing who complain about the boss together. But short of that, we have a great relationship. “Says the boss,” I know. She could just be flattering me into thinking she likes me, reinforcing the power dynamic, of course, but we’ve been working closely for three years now, and we both talk pretty openly about what’s working and what’s not. (Her more than me, which has been a real gift. She’s not afraid of starting a conversation with, “You’re not going to like this, but . . .”)
My other “coworkers” are my neighbors in our little industrial area. I’m next door to three blacksmiths (two of them women!), and we share things like office supplies and shipping materials. We also have “work” lunches a few times a year, and visit each other for afternoon chats. We’re not officially linked in any way, but we have each others’ backs.
I don’t have a business partner, but I am actively seeking one. For many years I’ve thought that eventually I would get the hang of the administrative side of business, despite all evidence to the contrary. My ADHD diagnosis last year helped me see, among other things, that instead of continuing to try to do something unlikely, it’s time to find someone complimentary.
What’s the thing people misunderstand about how your life and work, well, *work*?
People see me as much more organized and on top of things than I actually am. Visitors to the Orta studio often remark that it’s so clean and tidy, when all I see are the piles of chaos that need dealing with. Many of the public-facing parts of the business look pulled together, but I’m always afraid that things like our “open hours” don’t match between the website, our Google listing, and real life, or that email automations have quietly gone awry sending people weird stuff that makes no sense, or that the filters designed to catch customer service emails have missed something, and someone, somewhere is feeling abandoned. (If that’s you, I’m sorry, and please email me again!) These aren’t idle fears, btw. Each has happened! And I never know where the next one is coming from.
Because of this difference between my front stage and back stage, and my skill in masking, I’m more conscious of it in others, and try to give grace, both interpersonally and with my policies at work. For my one employee, her schedule is her own, as long as the work gets done. And if there is a crisis that makes her work a little late, that’s just life. In terms of customer service, our return policy is forever (no deadlines!) and I regularly extend discount codes if someone missed a sale by a day or three.
The flip side is that I also get unreasonably angry when grace is not extended to me, like hitting the brick wall of health insurance coverage, or brands offering ridiculously short windows to return purchases, especially when it’s accompanied with something like “well, if you’d thought about this earlier, you wouldn’t be in this situation, would you?”
How do you want to be identified?
I’m Anne Fletcher, and you can see Orta here.
If you’re interested in gardening, especially seeds and climate adaptation, you can sign up for my newsletter here.
And if you, or someone you know might be interested in partnership in Orta, the best way to contact me is here. You can also just say hi and tell me about your organizing systems!
For every “Day in the Life” interview like this we publish on Culture Study, I’m donating $500 to a non-profit organization of the author’s choice. What organization are we supporting with this interview, and why does their work matter to you?
The Organic Seed Alliance! When I went to the Organic Seed Alliance conference a few years ago, not only did I learn more about seeds in one day than I could have through months of online research, I got a good look into the world of seed farmers. They are breeding, preserving and producing the seeds that form the foundation of our food supply. Like so much critically important work (teaching, care work), organic seed work is very low paying.
The conference cost around $70 per day, *including food and lodging,* and there were stipends available for farmers who couldn't afford the ticket price. Most of the seed farmers I know say they would do the work for free, and only charge so that they can cover their cost of living. They are often working off-farm jobs as well. The Organic Seed Alliance supports this highly skilled, dedicated, and largely behind the scenes, profession that ensures that farmers have the seeds they need.
[AHP: And here’s the receipt for Culture Study’s donation — if you’d like to give, here’s how!]
