Your sultry pic goes viral, but leaves you with a deluge of garbage emails. Those short essays gathering dust on your desktop could bewitch clients, if only you’d sit down and format them for your blog. Six months’ worth of invoices floating in your inbox that you haven’t sent to your accountant.
Who knew that being hot on the internet meant so much paperwork?
On admin days you’re not just a provider, you’re a whole back office: digital marketer, webmaster, bookkeeper, social media manager, data analyst, email marketing specialist, operations manager. Performing all these roles – on top of creating content and seeing clients – can frazzle anyone. I help providers manage the business side of their business. Here’s my advice to help you get through your “admin days” as efficiently (and painlessly) as possible.
Pick the one thing you’re dreading most, and do it first
You already know what it is, and it’s probably small – even though it feels huge. A two-line email from a client that requires a one-word response? Digging through an old Protonmail account for an ad site password? Changing the font on your contact form? Whatever it is, identify the task that’s producing the most dread in your heart and attack it first. If you try to excavate around it – by doing every other admin task you can think of, hoping to “warm up” to it – the energy you spend in avoiding it will exhaust you.
If you’re anything like me, perhaps you have multiple tasks that you’re very busy avoiding. Pick the most income-generating of all of them to tackle first. If you have forty unread emails but see there’s a message from last year’s six-hour dinner date, ignore everyone else and just respond to that one good client. Remember, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, and you’re just one person running a whole business here; give yourself a break! Once you’ve completed the most dreaded task – or at least taken a crack at the one that’s most likely to pay off – the amount of relief you’ll feel will brighten your mood and lighten the rest of your mental load.
Have a defined business process and stick to it
As a sexy freelancer, your business probably got cobbled together over time as new situations and opportunities arose. Few providers had the luxury of strong mentorship and industry-specific business education when they started out. If you don’t take time to stop and evaluate your systems, you might go months or years before realizing there was an easier way to do things all along.
You are an independent business, and like all businesses you have systems in place already – but how can you define them for the first time? Pretend you’ve hired an assistant to run the business for you. How would you explain your operations if you had to teach them how to do it? Write down what you usually do in each step of the sales process, from advertising to client retention. Include temporal information, like your social media posting schedule, how quickly you want to respond to inquiries, or how soon after booking you require the deposit. Once you’ve defined it for yourself, you’ll have clarity – and be in a better position to ask for help when business booms.
After you’ve defined your systems comes the challenge of sticking to them. Consistency builds trust in an unstable sales ecosystem. Your clients will feel more at ease when they sense a consistent pattern in how you communicate with your audience, from your favorite emojis on X to the gift descriptions on your wishlist. This consistency is your brand, and every piece of it harmonizes to leave prospective clients with an impression of you that influences their likelihood of booking. This consistency is also helpful to you; once you’ve established a pattern and can follow it, you’re less likely to experience the decision fatigue that leads to snapping your laptop shut and jumping back under the covers. Your business processes may be in service of your brand, but they’re also in service of your mental wellbeing.
Mental clutter is just as heavy as physical clutter
Passwords, links to photosets, gift card balances, screening requests, contact form submissions – all this information can feel like death by a thousand cuts. You can use simple digital tools to build an infrastructure that sorts and holds all of these little demands on your attention.
Use a password manager to manage your logins. Don’t keep them in a note on your phone–all it takes is one person guessing your iCloud login to lock you out of all your accounts. Commit your master password to memory. Many sites are moving to two factor authentication; set this up wherever you can. Wherever you can securely do so, use computer power instead of brain power to manage your information.
Keeping track of where clients are in the booking and screening process is another field where technology can take the load. Providers do this in varying ways – be it a spreadsheet, color-coded labels in your email, or status notes on a work management platform – but whatever your system is, stick to it. Having at-a-glance clarity about where everyone is in the booking process protects you from losing business because you over-scheduled, and from the pain of wasting time entertaining fantasy bookers. Have a standard message created for each stage of the booking process and store them in your Notes app or as email signatures. Whenever you move a client along to the next stage of the booking process (date confirmed, deposit received, thank-you note sent), update your system. It’s painful to realize you’ve overlooked good money, but having a solid system keeps you on top of all your opportunities.
Track your own hours
Your one measurable output is your money, and your one measurable input is your time. This is why I recommend that even as a sex worker, you track your own hours.
Use a time-tracker app to “clock in” and “clock out” when you sit down to different admin tasks throughout the day or week. Any simple, free app will do the job. The human brain has not evolved to measure time very well (at least mine sure hasn’t) and if you’re not letting a machine track your time for you, you might end up spending tens of hours a month on tasks that don’t pay off or pay enough. “How do I know it’s worth it?” is the hardest question to answer in sex work, “it” being the hours you spend on Twitter, messaging with fans on OF, sending check-in texts to old clients, or any number of the tech-based activities that eventually result in cash in hand. Only you can make that value judgment, but not if you haven’t measured the values!
One of the best things about tracking your time (especially for the admin-avoidant amongst us) is that it can help build a positive self-perpetuating cycle: if you can show yourself that 10 more hours a week of admin translated to 5 more bookings last month, your dread of admin work is slowly replaced by excitement. When you have your own data, you can prove to yourself that yes, it is worth it – and change course if it isn’t!
Ask for and give help
Independent sex workers tend to be very, well... independent. It’s sometimes hard to ask for help, and even harder to let yourself receive it – especially when your labor is misunderstood or devalued by the wider business culture. But if Cindy from Accounts Payable gets to ask for help when she’s feeling overwhelmed at work, so do you! It’s both unrealistic and unkind to expect yourself to be able to “hunker down and do it” all the time. If you have safe people who you can invite to support you, do it – you’ll get further together than you would alone.
I recommend you schedule coworking dates with other providers in your circle, either in-person or virtually. Twice a week or twice a month, having these meetings scheduled will give you some temporal structure in what is otherwise a free-flowing and spontaneous worklife. Sit in the living room together, grab a conference room in a shared office (remember to turn on your VPN), or just Facetime on mute. You might find it easier to focus and complete tasks with another person working alongside you, with the added benefit of commiserating and bouncing ideas off of your coworking buddy.
Another way to ask for help is to simply… pay for it. If it can be safely outsourced, and you can afford it – hire out! Is it worth your entire admin day to research how to fix a bug on your website? Need to manually migrate your mailing list to a new service? You want your Dropbox sorted and files renamed, but it will take all day and some of tomorrow? There are absolutely talented people who will be more focused on doing a good job for fair pay than the nitty-gritty of your inbox – I know, because I’m one of them. Ask around in your network for trustworthy help, then interview and set expectations for them the same way you would if you were hiring someone to regrout your bathroom. Look up the going rates for services on Upwork or Fiverr, and don’t let yourself be overcharged or undercharged just because you’re a sex worker.
It can be hard to admit you can’t manage it all alone, so it’s good to remember that when you allow yourself to ask for and receive help you’re not the only person who benefits. Your coworking partner might depend on your work dates to keep from spiraling out; your freelance employees might be thrilled to be making good money outside of their regular wage work. Most importantly, you’re fostering a sense that someone else is “in it” with you – sharing not just the workload itself, but the mental weight of the work. Running a business from your laptop is a common experience in 2024, but it can also be an isolating one. Inviting support into that space can keep you on track both administratively and emotionally.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
Perfectionism is the silent killer of productivity. How many times have you typed out a tweet, second-guessed if it was funny or cute enough, deleted it and just kept scrolling? How many stunning portraits are collecting dust in your Dropbox right now because you’re just not quite sure they’re “good enough” to post? I’ve seen perfectionism and its evil twin, self-doubt, make the most magnetic and engaging providers freeze up, shut down, and abandon great marketing opportunities. My favorite saying is “The perfect is the enemy of the good”. It’s so much more important that things are done, rather than done perfectly. As providers it's achingly difficult to follow this maxim, as all of your marketing is ultimately a reflection of you – your body, your personality, your humor. How can you bear to put out something that doesn’t show you at your absolute best? Doing a “good enough” job and then letting go of the result feel counterintuitive, but it’s a crucial part of staying sane in an industry that requires constant self-promotion. Not every comment you write has to be inspired, not every photo you post has to have your best angle. You’re just a person trying to get something done, and sitting in fearful indecision about if what you're sharing is “good enough” will sap your time and cloud your spirit.
The same concept applies to your productivity. Any amount of admin you can get done today is better than no amount of admin. If you go into your admin day steeling yourself to do a thousand things perfectly, you might freeze up when you sit down and boot up your computer. Focus on the next fifteen minutes, rather than the next fifteen hours. Focus on the one task in front of you, rather than the ocean of tasks you “need” to do. Whip out that timer and set it; once you’re done with that first 15, you can decide if you want to set for 15 more (or go get an iced coffee). Narrowing your field of vision to just what’s in front of you will help you stay in the moment and make it less likely you trip the wire and shut down for the day. Remember, you’re just a person trying to do a job with the tools you have at hand. Don’t let perfectionism and shame throw sand in your gears and ultimately take dollars out of your pocket.
I hope these suggestions have sparked some new awareness for you that will make your next admin day a little bit easier and a lot more organized. Defining your business process, cleaning up mental clutter, asking for help and letting go of perfectionism won’t just make you more money, it will help you avoid or alleviate the spots of burnout that every provider goes through. Above all, be kind to yourself. Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to your coworking buddy – supportive, gentle, encouraging. I believe that with a little help, anyone can build the processes that turn a sexy alter-ego into an efficient, well-run business – and get through their next admin day not just unscathed, but satisfied with a job well done!
Vera is a NYC-based digital assistant who helps providers manage the “business” side of their business. Find more info at her website.
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