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

March 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Is There a Trick to Getting Everything Done?

March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

Ping: Lunch Catered by Internet Middlemen

September 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

NO journalist likes to be told he’s naïve. But that’s what Zach Yungst, co-founder of cater2.me, told me after I wrote a Ping column suggesting that companies that pay for their employee’s meals, as many high-tech firms do, retard the economic life of a neighborhood.

It’s true that these companies, which are paying engineers $100,000 or $150,000 a year, have every incentive to keep their employees at their desks working, he said in an e-mail. Paying for a meal gets a firm another $50 to $70 of work from an office-bound worker during the lunch hour.

Mr. Yungst and his business partner, Alex Lorton, have thought a lot about that. Cater2.me, the company they’ve started in San Francisco, delivers food from carts and small restaurants to businesses that aren’t big enough to afford their own chefs. “We fill a big void,” says Mr. Yungst.

Mr. Yungst and Mr. Lorton are online much of the day reading food blogs, looking for trends and figuring out which chefs to approach on the weekends, but they are classic middlemen.

Hold on, though, wasn’t that a job description that the Internet was destroying? There was even a 25-cent word for it: disintermediation. The Web, we were told, was eliminating the need for the layers of brokers, agents, wholesalers and even retailers that separate the consumer from the producer.

That has happened in some instances, drastically reducing the role of travel agents, for example. But consumers still need help and the Internet has provided the tools and the environment for companies like cater2.me to flourish. It has made it easier for middlemen to reach consumers and made it remarkably easy and inexpensive for these middlemen to create companies to do just that.

While there has been a lot of talk about how the technology industry does not create jobs on the scale of traditional manufacturing — a shrunken General Motors still employs more people than a thriving Google — the Internet has made it a lot easier to create a broad array of new small businesses.

Cater2.me is a good example of it. Both of its founders are Wharton business school graduates who began their careers in the kinds of jobs you’d expect B-schoolers to take; Mr. Yungst joined an investment bank and a private equity firm while Mr. Lorton took a job as a business consultant.

Mr. Yungst visited many offices in San Francisco, and strolled past food trucks on the city streets selling porchetta sandwiches, curries, barbecue and just about anything you can think of stuffed in a taco. This gave him an idea: if people can’t get out to the food, Mr. Yungst would bring the food to them. Mr. Lorton, who had met Mr. Yungst when they were both freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania, liked the idea and joined him.

They talked to chefs who were just starting out, many of them hoping to break into the catering business while working in communal kitchens and running pop-up restaurants, farmers’ market food stands or food trucks. The chefs lacked the time and the connections to get inside offices to sell their food.

The two partners found Feldo Nartapura outside a Mission district art gallery grilling skewers of Indonesian sate on a portable grill. Entree to the office-worker market has given him more business and spread his weekend-concentrated business over seven days.

“I have consistent work,” he said. “Before I’d only look forward to the weekend.”

Joseph Ahearne, who makes Argentine empanadas, says of the new arrangement, “It helps to keep the wheels rolling.” The consistent work means he has hired seven people to help him make little meat-filled pastries using his mother’s recipe. Without worrying as much about drumming up business, he says, “I can concentrate on the kitchen.”

All the while, the two were talking to financial and technology companies in downtown San Francisco. (The Internet doesn’t eliminate the need for old-fashioned shoe leather.) Many companies were already having food delivered. Cater2.me’s pitch was that they’d reliably provide variety.

This is where the Internet was a boon to the new middlemen. They could provide a slick order form that even the newest and lowliest employee — the one often stuck with the task of coordinating lunch for everyone else — could navigate. “We understand the stresses on the person who orders the food,” said Mr. Yungst. “We make them look good.”

NOW, an office containing 10 to 250 people can order around 30 kinds of food from 70 vendors. One day it might be Dontaye Ball’s barbecue and the next Veronica Salazar’s chicken mole sliders. (“We call them sliders because people don’t know they are hojaldritas,” she says.) The company says that it provides Malaysian, Venezuelan, Jamaican and African meals as well as more familiar Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Italian food.

They built a back-end system that tracks which companies prefer what kind of foods. Cater2.me now has about 80 clients including prominent start-ups like Ngmoco, Yelp and Posterous.

The middlemen have put the chefs front and center with their clients. “We never white label a product,” says Mr. Lorton.

The chefs are pleased that new customers are becoming acquainted with their fare. People seek them out at farmers’ markets or fairs. Mr. Nartapura’s Satayisfied stand and Ms. Salazar’s El Huarache Loco stand are now fixtures at San Francisco street food fairs.

Mr. Hall, who delivers his sandwiches and salads in his “pulled-pork Prius,” says, “It’s kind of cool to see corporate customers embrace street food.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dbbf002ad47fbbc9e864c5dbccb9b1ae

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,