Get Organized Part I: Your Design Process

There’s nothing I love more than a good organizing project, and the new year is a perfect time to get your systems organized in your interior design business!  If you’ve been running around playing whack-a-mole with your chaotic to-do list, always feeling behind on your overwhelming design projects, you’re going to love this 4-part blog series where I’m going to show you exactly how to get your design process, your projects, and your calendar organized.  By the end of this series you’re going to be feeling refreshed and much more in control of your time and your interior design projects!  

This first week, we’re going to start with organizing your design process. 

Why do we start here?  Because having a design process is the foundation to relaxed control in your business. Without a design process, you’re reinventing the wheel with each new project.  You’re constantly writing and re-writing your to-do list and wasting precious brain-power deciding what your highest priority should be each day. 

Having a design process is like putting your projects on autopilot, so you can focus on actually being creative, instead of merely getting things done.  Excited?  

With a design process, you decide in advance exactly what steps you take with every project.  You lay out a week-by-week plan, and goals for each week, so you can plan ahead and always know what’s coming up (instead of deciding each week).  You follow the same process on every project, whether it is a bathroom or a whole house (the time-frames just change depending on the scale of the project).  You show up looking like a pro to your clients by letting them know what to expect, and they can relax and trust you to guide them through the process.  This makes your job so much easier and leads to more referrals - win!  

Step 1

So let’s get started!  Organizing your design process is just like organizing a room in your house.  First you’re going to gather everything together in one place.  For your process, that means getting out a piece of paper and brainstorming everything you do on a typical project.  Pull out old invoices and time logs from previous projects to jog your memory if needed. 

Step 2

Next, you’re going to organize your big pile of to-dos into buckets.  For interior design, our buckets are our design phases.  Typical design phases for interior design are as follows:

• Programming, aka Discovery, when you figure out what problem you’re trying to solve, interview the client or give them questionnaires, measure, take photos and document the site.
• Schematic Design, or Concepts, when you lay out the floorplan and get the rough overall style of the project together with images, etc. 
• Design Development, when you select everything and finalize all of the design details.
• Construction Documents, when you complete the plans and specifications needed to build the project
• Construction Administration, when you answer questions and provide revisions during construction ensure your design intent is realized.  

 You may have more, fewer or different design phases, but the first step in organizing your process is to decide what they are and divide all of your tasks into these buckets!  Not having design phases is like trying to organize your garage without bins, and just putting each item on the shelf loose  - it would be chaos, right? So if you’re not used to having phases, keep that garage image in mind and start using phases!  

 Step 3

The last step to organizing your design process  is to put everything in order by phase and divide the steps into a week-by-week plan, from start to finish.  By the end of this, you should know exactly how many weeks your typical design process is, and your goals for each week.  

 This weekly plan is a step that many people skip when creating a design process, and to me it is the difference between having a process that gathers dust on your hard drive and one that gets pulled out and used on every project.  This step takes it out of the cloud and makes it actionable, so don’t skip this part!  

 Using the Process

Whenever you get a new project, you plug it into your typical process.  If it is a small project or a large project, you can tweak the timeframes for your project accordingly, but the steps and phases remain the same.  For example, if you typically spend 3 weeks for schematic design for a kitchen, you might spend 12 weeks for that same phase for a whole house.  All the other phases would get expanded as well.  The phases and the steps are the same, but they just get expanded or contracted depending on the scale of your project.  

 Getting your design process written out and defined is going to make organizing your projects and your time so much easier in the future. 

If you’d like some more guidance in this, I have a few exciting options coming up.  

First, if you’re going to KBIS in Las Vegas make sure you sign up for "Voices from the Industry" because I’ll be giving my Power of Process workshop on January 31st, 2022.  The Power of Process workshop takes you step-by-step through this process with a detailed workbook and you leave with your customized design process completed.  Click Below 👇 to get on my mailing list and get details for that.  

If you’re ready to finally get your process organized this year, you’re going to want to check out my Design Roadmap Course HERE.  It gives you everything you need to get your process, your projects and your calendar organized and under control in your interior design business. 

Our Winter Cohort is getting started soon, so now is the perfect time to get on my email list by clicking below 👇 so you’ll be the first to know when the cart opens for the Winter Cohort.