She Owns It: Is There a Trick to Getting Everything Done?

She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

At the most recent meeting of the She Owns It business group, the owners shared the frustrations of never being able to get to everything. The big things — those critical to the business — get done, said Susan Parker, who owns the dressmaker Bari Jay. But she added that everything else tended to get pushed to the bottom of the pile.

“I worked with a business coach, and he told me my time from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. should be my own,” said Beth Shaw, who owns YogaFit. The idea is that she should not check e-mail, take phone calls or have meetings during those hours. Instead, the coach suggested, she should engage in creative work and develop bigger ideas for the business. And, especially given the nature of her business, this should also be her exercise time. The coach told her she should be in the office with her staff from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then work on her own from about 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

“How’s that going?” asked Jessica Johnson, who owns Johnson Security Bureau.

“It’s not going that well because I wake up, and the first thing I do is look at my iPhone,” Ms. Shaw said. “All the financial reports of what we did the day before come in overnight, and often I’ll just get sucked in.”

“How can that not be the first thing you do?” Ms. Parker asked.

“I know,” said Deirdre Lord, who owns Megawatt Hour, an energy-related start-up. “People say, ‘Set times when you respond and look at e-mail,’ which I agree with in theory, but if a customer needs to reach you …”

“Or your business partner,” Ms. Shaw added.

“But how many times is it really business-critical and can it not wait an hour?” Ms. Johnson asked. She stressed the importance of training people not to expect that you’ll be at their beck and call, which is the impression you give when you jump every time your BlackBerry or iPhone buzzes.

Has Ms. Johnson managed to do this herself?

“Heck no, but I’m working on it,” she said.

She does, however, have a routine she finds helpful. Every morning, she spends an hour at home, sitting in a quiet place with paper and pen.

“No iPhone?” Ms. Lord asked.

Ms. Johnson shook her head no.

“Oh, good for you,” Ms. Shaw said.

“That first hour has to be for me,” Ms. Johnson said. “I drink a glass of water and start writing: if I only accomplish three things today, what are those three things going to be?” Jumping into the demands of addressing calls and e-mails “throws you all off kilter,” she added.

Ms. Shaw agreed.

If you’re responding to your business partner, chief operating officer, or anyone else, you won’t accomplish your own goals, Ms. Johnson said. Sure, they may be able to get their work done, but Ms. Johnson said she had found that by the time they asked whether you needed help, “it’s usually when they’re walking out the door.”

Ms. Lord mentioned a service called IFTTT — if this, then that. “You go onto a Web site, and if you have something critical, you can type in, ‘If I get an e-mail from this client, then text message me,’” she said. “It’s good if there is something really critical, and you don’t want to look at anything except for that.”

Offering another suggestion, Ms. Lord said she has started putting her daily to-do list on an index card. “Literally, no more than that — each day, one index card,” she said. Long to-do lists are meaningless, she said, “but it’s hard not to get in that habit of adding and adding and adding.”

Ms. Parker said she felt as if she spent her day dealing with whatever came her way.

“Yes,” Ms. Lord said.

“If I have the time, I do the big things — so my little things, like my desk right now is an utter disaster,” Ms. Parker said.

“When do you ever get free time is the thing?” Ms. Shaw asked.

“I feel like if I actually worked smart the whole day, I would have the time,” Ms. Parker said. “What I do for myself is, anything I need to get done, I put it in my calendar with a specific day and time.” But then she keeps hitting snooze when the specific day and time roll around.

Ms. Lord has a project like that. It concerns an important product the Megawatt Hour must highlight on its Web site. She needs to create marketing information that explains its value proposition, and develop case studies that show how it has saved customers money. “I need to really drive that, and it keeps getting moved to the back burner,” she said. She wondered if maybe she should spend, say, two hours a day on it until it’s done — “almost block it off in my calendar,” she said.

“But that’s getting the big stuff done — I get my big stuff done,” Ms. Parker said. It’s the little things that suffer, she said — things that nonetheless might ultimately make a big difference. She couldn’t give an example of any such project, but said her desk was covered with them.

“I’ll give you an example: calling an old client,” Ms. Johnson said. “You have to make a conscious decision to do that.”

“Or use a really good C.R.M. system” — customer-relations management software — “that would remind you once a month to call,” said Ms. Shaw, who added that she had finally made progress toward getting one. YogaFit plans to start using Salesforce.com, which offers a cloud-based C.R.M. application.

“May I make one more suggestion in terms of time management?” Ms. Johnson asked. “I’ve read that if you break your day into 50-minute blocks, you can get more done.” The idea is to use the 10 remaining minutes of every hour to get up and walk around. “It gets your blood flowing, makes you think about things that you otherwise might not be thinking about.”

Ms. Lord offered another suggestion. “The other thing I’ve tried and not kept up with is, if you have something on your to-do list and it keeps getting bumped because it’s something that you’re just not excited to do, just get up in the morning and make it the first thing you do,” she said. “Get it out of the way and then you have this energy to tackle all these other things.”

Have you discovered the secret to time management? If so, please share.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/is-there-a-trick-to-getting-everything-done/?partner=rss&emc=rss