Business Archives - Not Quite Cooked

Two days on Kalkadoon Country

I love my work. Even the bits I don’t really like – like bookkeeping – I actually find fascinating. I love that I’m learning how the numbers work, how they matter and how they can help me do the business better. Even though I’m not very good at it.

Why did it take so long to get to growth?

I want to get this out of my head. Sometimes in live events your brain decides to in a tangent you’ve not prepared for. Does anyone else experience that?

So I was on a panel yesterday and I’m not happy with my performance, multiple reasons. But the first one is one I consistently f-up, and need to get my head around it.

It’s about my business journey. I said something like – I started my first business in 1994, but wasn’t really ‘full-time’ in it until 2018 after my youngest finished school. Since 2018 it’s grown ten-fold. So really, the ‘growth’ phase is only 4 or 5 years old.

Find the small spaces

This is not a post about scheduling every second of the day. It’s not about filling your day from the moment you wake up til when you sleep.

This is a post about how sometimes, the perfect chunk of time never comes, but don’t let that stop you.

In my last time management post I talked about how in an ideal world I would have full days to get things done, but that never happens in reality. In that post I talked about how breaking big jobs into bite-sized chunks, putting each stage into an Action Plan can help you get to your goals.

A fresh blogging challenge – build a business blog.

I’m not sure who suggested it, but sometime late last year or earlier this year someone asked if we could look more at blogging for our Tuesday night sessions for One Business. OMGosh.

That one innocent request has been about, and I’m not overexaggerating here, about 30 solid hours of work for me. When they asked, I was like cool, have heaps of stuff already written, I know this topic, how hard can it be. Yeah right.

How do you eat an elephant?

At the start of the year in One Business, we looked at goal setting and time management. I created a Business Goals Action Plan Tool that involves dividing our year-long goals into quarters and months.

Starting the year off looking at business goals is reflective of my recent obsession with managing my time. With my increasing commitments, my time during the week is even more scarce and precious. And while I do have moments of OMFG! what on earth am I doing, I am just bloody doing it.

I’m not sure this is a universal truth, but I have been recently thinking:

If you don’t manage time, you will never have enough of it.

I see other people who do not manage time who have way fewer daily commitments than me really struggle to get what they want done. (And are stressed about it)

This is why I’ve begun to think about the importance of managing time.

Saturday diary entry

Another restless night with my brain going ‘twenty to the dozen’. I was awake at 6.30 because I’d forgotten to turn off my parkrun alarm. As much as I tried I just couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up and was at my desk by 7am. Managed to smash out four solid hours of work. I shouted myself a nanna-nap and slept until 3 which was awesome. But when I went back to my desk I could barely see my screen. My eyes were just so sore.

Grateful to our team

Mid-last year our team grew. Amanda who I’d known for a few years but hadn’t really worked closely with joined the Iscariot Media team.

By 2019, what a year!

Just like last year’s wrap up – here we go. Some of the big things included –