The Women Entrepreneurs Blog @ Simon

Make sure you don’t lose the lesson

I run the school magazine – the World According to Simon (WATS) – and let me tell you, “it ain’t no walk in the park.” Don’t get me wrong, I love the magazine to death but producing it definitely isn’t an easy task, especially since we increased frequency from quarterly to monthly. That being said, I wouldn’t change a thing about the experience because it has been so educational from an entrepreneurial perspective. These are some of the lessons I’ve learnt during my time running the magazine:

Choose your team very wisely. These are the people who will support you. They should be excellent at what they do, very committed and complementary to each other. If they aren’t, you will find yourself overburdened with work and putting in longer hours than you expected.  Choosing a great team requires evaluating people on what they bring to the table and forgetting relationships like friends, family, significant other etc. In re-organizing and expanding the WATS team I had to pass over friends who could do a reasonable job for persons who could do an excellent job.

Make sure you have excellent time management skills. There just aren’t enough hours in the day so you better know how to effectively manage the ones you have. I am currently doing three courses, working on this blog, working at the school writing center, managing a magazine, producing a newsletter, helping to run the entrepreneurship club and still working on my business plan. Beyond these duties there are still breakfast, lunch and dinner events to attend as well as guest lectures. Of course you can’t work all the time so I still need to hang out with my friends. My appointment book and Outlook calendar have become my greatest allies. They help me to effectively manage my time so I don’t break commitments left, right and center.

Have a “can do” attitude. Something unexpected will always pop up - someone can’t complete an article on time; someone can’t find the photograph you wanted; someone can’t interview the person you wanted or someone can’t lay out the magazine. As an entrepreneur you’ll have to put out lots of fires so you better think you can handle them. If you don’t, you’ll spend too much time worrying and complaining instead of looking for ways to rectify the situation.

Women Business Owners and Time Management

Women entrepreneurs rarely have time to think consciously about time management, but the truth is, without it they fail.

And women business owners (who are forced to manage their time more or less efficiently) sometimes forget how the rest of the world lives, until they accidently find themselves back in that space. Like driving somewhere at 10 AM. What is wrong with these people? Why are they driving so slowly? How about lunch with "the girls"?  Why do they sit there after the lunch hour has expired?

This must be the reason why women entrepreneurs seem to have an immediate link to each other. It's a sisterhood dedicated to time management. And that must be why so many women in business do a lot of their shopping online, which is good for me and my business!

A recent NY Times Blog Shifting Careers post, 5 Time-Mangement Tips, by Marci Alboher offers some great advice and links to more information expanding on these suggestions:

1. Tame the e-mail beast (including an InboxZero video presentation at Google)
2. Eliminate unnecessary meetings
3. Put up boundaries
4. Find your rhythm and schedule around it
5. Say no

Isn't that last one often the hardest for women?