A Month in the Life of an Entrepreneur: Week 2 

Last week, I wrote about my first week of time tracking. It hasn't been an exact science, but I am doing my best to capture what I am doing throughout the day. If you are interested, you can check out my tracking log here. I thought I would write this series to give a behind-the-scenes view of working on my business while working in my business. 

I am looking for themes and places within my systems and workflows that cause me the most frustration throughout the week. One area that is afire with frustration - managing all of my emails. My assistant and I have been working on her combing through and deleting the junk that comes in and assigning other emails into specific Task lists. Once I complete them, I can delete or file them. The challenge comes when I have a day where I can't get to email and it builds. It can feel completely overwhelming sometimes. 

Last week I shared that I am going to have to build in troubleshooting time into each day. I think I am also going to need to reserve an hour each day dedicated solely to email. That seems like a lot of time. I imagine some days, I will not need an entire hour and others I may need more than an hour. It just depends on what is going on. 

This weekend, we are hosting a 12 hour Qualified Supervisor CE event. There have been quite a few technical issues, people wanting to change their training date to a later offering, and folks that simply have a lot of questions. This week has brought in more emails requiring immediate attention due to those things. This is a training we offer four times per year. In the week leading up to the training, I am going to need to decrease how many clients I see to allow for more administrative time. 

What I have learned over the years in practice is that nothing is complete. No system is perfect or will function effectively forever. Systems and workflows are in constant need of reevaluation and tweaking. Right now as things are growing, much of how I have been managing my business is no longer working. Major tweaks lie ahead. 

Next week, I plan on writing about the painful but necessary process of terminating things within your business in order to welcome in something fresh and exciting.