Archive for November, 2007
My husband emailed me this link to Mind Tools-Essential Skills for an Excellent Career. Specifically, he sent me to the “Time Management” pages (I won’t get into whether or not that was a hint ! ha ha), which is the section I’ve gone through.
I found the site to be an incredibly great reminder of ways to ‘stay on track’. I’m already great about To-Do lists, but now, I’m applying the priorities and then re-writing the list so that only “Important” items are at the top. And then I work down the list.
What I saw immediately is that some of my most important tasks have stayed on my To-Do list the longest. By having them buried somewhere in the middle, I’m able to excuse them by not really ‘seeing’ them. Now these things are at the top and have to happen first. I can also see that I “skip” over them lightly because they are tasks I don’t like doing.
We’re working on tracking how long all of our tasks take, and that’s also a real eye-opener. I spend a lot more time dilly-dallying during the day than I thought I did. But this is good news (and not to be mistaken with IMPORTANT brain breaks and kid-time). It’s good news because it means I really DO have more time in the day to get stuff done. A lot of emails can be accomplished in a “found” 15 minutes.
The best by-product of this is that by the time I reach my night, my stress levels are down because I know I took care of the most important stuff for that day. If I keep working after the kids are in bed, it gets to be on some of my more enjoyable tasks – like DESIGNING!!!!
By the way – Project Runway is back on Wed. nights!!
November 30th, 2007
I don’t know why it took us a year’s worth of trade show and consumer events to realize that we need a custom-crafted display for our custom-crafted blankets. Oh wait, yes I do, because you can’t do it ALL!!
We finished a great even in Arizona over the weekend. As random things in life go, we heard about this seasonal gifting boutique through my sister-in-law and decided to give it a try. It turned out to be great for us; way more traffic there than the Hollywood shopping boutique we did a few weeks ago.
This last event finally made us see that no matter how we used the standard backdrops or garment racks or tables or shelves – our blankets are not displayed to their fullest potential. I spent time watching people as they would walk up to to our booth, so I could track where their eyes went. About 80% of the time their eyes went to the table, many times they never looked up behind us – where we had the blankets hung. We have too many other products to take up the whole top of a table with a blanket.
Now, we’ve sketched an idea for a simple, yet stunning display that will work for the blankets, will convey that they are personalizable, and will work with various booth height requirements. Booth height requirements matter at trade shows because sometimes you have the liberty of going up 8′ and sometimes only 4′.
So, the goal is to have the new display ready by the next event. Which should be easy, but I think I’m always telling myself that!
November 14th, 2007
Little snippets of time. Everything in my life, and business, now happens in increments of time – specifically the amount of time between “events”. We had a cash-n-carry shopping event three weeks ago, which left us two weeks until Halloween events with the kids, which left us with a week and a half until the next shopping event. It’s been this way for a few months, since the ABC Show. I think I had a whole month of nothing before the ABC Show, but since then – one thing or another is looming on the horizon.
My daughter started kindergarten (Spanish immersion no less), and so now there are two schools worth of events and stuff to manage. And somehow, having so much “scheduled” is increasing our productivity and, dare I say, our sanity?
The semester that I made the Dean’s list in college was the semester that I was also working two jobs. Both almost full-time. Because the busier you are, the more time-crunched you are, and that’s just the right amount of pressure to kick you in gear. Knowing that I only had an hour between jobs made that hour precious.
This is also exactly why I have to get better at setting incremental deadlines for the business. Instead of just end-of-the-line pipe dream goals. In corporate life, I had to do the project schedules, breaking months and months worth of a project into biweekly deadlines. We can do this for ourselves too. It will help us to hold ourselves accountable and it will help me know where to ask for help more!!!
The more we can break down our project schedules, our business cycles, our to-do lists, the more we’re going to build up our business. Which is good, because our new BIG BROAD focus is taking it to the next level…
November 4th, 2007
